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Creative Commons Video Challenges Hollywood's Best
Supercharged_Z06 writes "A short film entitled Sintel was released by the Blender Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (YouTube link). It was created by an international team of artists working collaboratively using a free, open source piece of 3D rendering software called Blender. No Hollywood studio was involved in its making. Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent. If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road."
Is this really that different from Elephants Dream?
Well they replaced over-repeating the name "Emo!" in dialog with over-repeating the name "Scales!" so that it grates in your ears hours later.
But seriously, this one had the best story in the ED/Big Buck Bunny series.,, though it took a little while to get going and I wish the "twist" was a little clearer. Even a line like "My God. How long have I been..." trailing off would have made it more understandable.
That said, I think it was a technical and creative triumph. There's some real talent out there and I look forward to the next one.
Funny, I had to go back to that scene to see the scar you mentioned. I think the GP is right, the story gives no idea of the time scale.
After you realize it, she does look older in the final scenes, though.
I own and operate a movie theatre. I wonder if these folks have considered making a 35mm version of their short for theatres to play before the main features.
It would be a way to gain a lot more exposure and publicity than they will get otherwise.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Yes, #2. And I agree that the story is terrible. But the main goal of the project was to demonstrate the capability of open source tools. Of course, the really big cost is not the tools, it's the efforts of the team creating the movie.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Without the scar, there's nothing to differentiate this dragon from any other. If you didn't expect the results by the time the fight paused we get a big hint it's her dragon when he sniffs her. Even then we might not be sure it's her dragon until you see the scar. *shrug* I think they pulled this one off really well. Maybe it wasn't a GREAT tragedy, but it was certainly decent, especially given the time frame. My props to the team. I liked this movie a lot better than Big Buck Bunny or Elephant's Dream - that one would've been a lot better had one of the characters not been named Emo.
This is what I REALLY don't get anymore with the open source community. Open Source in the beginning was a great way to empower the individual and small users. I myself use Open Source all the time.
However, to YET AGAIN demonstrate the power of tools is missing the point. I know Open source is great. I am very very aware of that fact. Yes Fact!
But when will there be a real movie? Here is the thing. A mock movie while great is not getting the voice of the paying public. As one individual says. Giving away software is a good feeling. But getting people to part with their money and give it to you is an even better feeling.
So what I would like to see is a movie that people are willing to pay for and watch...
Until then what's the difference between this movie and Numa Numa guy (YouTube). And this guy has a network, etc, etc... While the Numa Numa guy might add questionable value to the overall scheme of things he probably is getting people to part with money to pay him...
Get my drift?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Drinks all around for the folks behind this, but in many ways it's still far short of what Hollywood can do
Not really. Blender Foundations budget for this was about 30,000 Euro a minute. A typical Hollywood flick has a budget of a million euro a minute or more. Increase our funding by nearly two orders of magnitude to match that of hollywood and you can get a competitive result.
These shorts are to improve blender at least as much as they are to generate interest in it.
As far as full movies in Blender? Well, there's Plumiferos, even though it's not a Hollywood movie.
Blender has some challenges in Hollywood. The main one is that Hollywood studios already have 3D packages they use and many YEARS of time devoted to those tools, making plugins for those tools, etc.
I'd expect it to get more traction in independent films, or even T.V., before there's a big enough critical mass of professional artists to do a large scale Hollywood CG movie with Blender, even if the tool is capable of producing such a movie today. There's Project London that seems to be making decent use of it. Some scenes are better, some are worse, but it's certainly an ambitious project.
The Blender team seems to be happy with the people who are using it, and I think the Blender project is one of the more successful projects that moved from proprietary to open source. Just because the project is smaller scale than a Hollywood movie doesn't mean that Blender isn't finding a lot of niches.
Seeing as there are "hacker" (=amateur engineer) cooperatives renting office space in the middle of New York City, yes, a few grand a month is easily within the reach of "the masses" if they pool their resources.
Hell I know some people (saps and idiots) who spend nearly $1000 a month consuming media...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
More of a time/budget issue than anything. Pixar has an enormous staff of tool coders to make stuff like footsteps in the snow work just right. This project had 2-3 coders helping out, but they split their time between various thing like rendering, simulation, etc. There was certainly no time to have one person tweak snow deformation (you can read the Sintel blog to learn about what went into making cloth simulation work for the dragon wings). So yeah they used tricks, but that is common to all lower budget movies. Also note that this had a 6-8 month time line -- which included script writing. Pixar has a 3-4 year time line for such things. They have separate crews working on various projects so they can knock one out every 2 years or so.
So yeah with only so much budget you can shake the camera and probably should if needed. Unless you like unfinished projects.
after a bit of shrewd business dealings were able to get a CEO of a major entertainment company fired (Michale Eisner) and take over a sizable chunk of the Walt Disney Corporation in the process of merely "demonstrating" their technical capabilities
Pixar actually played a fairly minor role in Eisner's ouster, which had been building since not long after Frank Wells died in 1994. There were a number of political issues within the company and a number of critical blunders that Eisner had made since Wells' death that were the main contributors to the staggering vote of no confidence he received at the 2004 shareholders' meeting, which in turn was the prime cause of his departure. The pissing contest he chose to get into with Steve Jobs over the Pixar distribution deal was merely the straw that broke the shareholders' back, and regardless of the outcome he likely would have been forced out within the year anyway. Even Roy Disney was actively calling for Eisner's departure at the time.
The other key thing to remember about the Pixar/Disney relationship and the influence over Disney that Pixar acquired is that it's largely due to one man - John Lasseter, who was formerly a Disney animator, truly understands the Disney corporate culture, and frankly is on the level of Walt Disney himself when it comes to storytelling and having an innate understanding of what people will respond to. Pixar's technical prowess likely wouldn't have meant much without Lasseter's raw talent to guide it, IMO.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Perhaps feature wise they are close but having
used both, it is clear that Photoshop’s interface
well not perfect, is vastly more thought out and
user friendlily than Gimp’s.
Comparing Gimp to Photoshop is like comparing
Sintel to Pixar’s Ratatouille. Yes, Sintel shows
promise, but it in no way challenges Hollywood’s
best.
On Gimp:
If you want Gimp to gain ground, why does it still
feel like it is aimed at code-heads? I do not like
compiling my own programs and like apps to
install easily with a good simple installer or by
drag and drop. I do not wish to hunt around for
open source libraries which, for some reason,
are not included but are needed to run.
Why is there not a user-friendly mac build that
installs easily and uses a native mac UI?
If http://www.pixelmator.com/ can do it, why
not gimp?
It’s all well and good that it can open PSDs
(whose file format I hear is a bit of a nightmare),
but can it work with smart objects?
Can I use it to open and edit Camera Raw files
as a professional and not feel limited by the
technology?
I know photoshop is not perfect. In fact I am
finding less and less reasons to upgrade. But
I am sorry, Gimp is just not usable for me yet.
- Joel
Disclaimer: I haven't used Photoshop for years. I've been using Free Software exclusively for probably four years now, and in the time since then I've done a little bit of professional photo work, but for the most part I'm what you'd call an advanced amateur, or something like that.
For basically anything you'll need to do, yes, GIMP is completely adequate. It does, however, miss some key features that I would REALLY love to see from even older versions of Photoshop. Others have mentioned most of them...layer effects would be absolutely wonderful to have back, as well as grouping layers and being able to select and move multiple layers at a time. In theory, 16 bit color would be nice, although I've honestly never been able to tell the difference in the finished product, and GEGL should take care of that. Photoshop's interface behaves a little bit nicer than GIMP's (for instance, GIMP's layer panel will grab keyboard focus so that I have to click back over to the image window if I want to keep on using keyboard shortcuts) as well.
In general, though, none of that matters to the end product. They're inconveniences that I've learned to work around, and I'm okay with that for the sake of avoiding proprietary software. When it comes down to it, there's never come a time when I've thought "Oh darn, I wish I could do that, but I can't because GIMP won't let me do it."