Ian Lewis' Blog

For those of you who haven't seen the movie. Here it is in it's full length splendor! I hope that the blender community can create some big buck bunny sequels building on the work that they have done. I'm looking forward to seeing some more of Big Buck's adventures.

My Big Buck Bunny DVD came in the mail today!! It came a bit faster than I expected, but that's nothing to complain about!

I have to hand it to the Big Buck Bunny folks, they really did I much better job with this movie than with the previous one in terms of quality of the timing, music, animation, and finishing. It provided a much more fluid and enjoyable movie. The DVDs have a good amount of extras including commentary, "making of" documentary, and some silly outtakes.

I've always thought that the project was a super idea to push the envelope of Blender, not just as an open source project, but as a product in general. So many open source projects are not able to be tested by real world situations, but the Blender folks came up with a super way to improve Blender and at at the same time produce an enjoyable short film.

The Big Buck Bunny DVDs arrived at the Blender institute so that means that I should be getting my DVD soon. I'm totally looking forward to checking it out since I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about and observing the movie's the creation process.

Apparently they have about 2500 DVDs to send and they have to send mine all the way to Japan so I might not get mine until after the internet downloads have opened up but I think having the DVD will make it easier to enjoy the movie since I won't have to wait for a download and deal with the huge HD encoded movie file.

The Google Open Source Blog mentioned the Blender Foundation's project Big Buck Bunny in their most recent post about the Libre Graphics Meeting. Hopefully that will get some more exposure for what I think is a really cool and successful project to improve the quality and usefulness of open source software. The chairman, Ton Roosendaal, is truely an amazing person.

The trailer for the peach movie project is out. The title is "Big Buck Bunny" and it looks great. Be sure to check out the higher definition versions on the website!! Or watch the high definition streaming version at vimeo.

Peach just released on the Peach blog some animation tests that test the new model rigs that they have been working on. The rigger Nathan has been working on creating rigs for the 3D models that are used for the animation. Basically the rig is the skeleton and rules that you use to move the character around. You can check out the blog post here and the rigging demo posts here and here. If you can help it I would encourage you to check out the rigging demo videos first so you can see what features they created for the models and then the animation test to see how they used them. Pretty cool stuff.

Today I found the Peach website and became one of the first 1000 to pre-order the DVD. If you get it you should see my name in the credits.

Peach is the next short movie project after Elephants Dream that is being produced by the Blender Foundation. It is an open movie like Elephants Dream so it will be presumably released under the creative commons and available for download for free as well as being developed entirely using free software. Most prominently, Blender.

I simply can't express in words how cool I think this is. The Blender Foundation has done a terrific job promoting Blender, and creating projects and conferences around it. I think they have done a huge service to the free software community by developing Blender into a mature and very usable, professional piece of software, and to academics by submitting the results of both Elephants Dream and, soon, Peach to the ACM SigGraph conference.

Another project to keep an eye on is Plumíferos which I think is aiming to be a longer film project created using Blender. It's amazing to see the interesting projects and work coming from the Blender community.

I really hope for more of the best for Blender and the community as they continue to create quality software and open content.

I was surfing the web earlier and found a link to elephantsdream.org. It's a project to create a movie short created with only open software like Blender. The production files are also available under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The content itself was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam and financed equally by the Blender Foundation and Montevideo in the Netherlands.

I checked out the movie and it's actually really good. Though it's only a short about 10 minutes long or so, it has a pretty interesting premise and obviously had high quality production, art, writing and direction. I would urge anyone who hasn't seen it to check it out sometime. They also have a documentary about the making of the short which I haven't watched yet but no doubt that it would be interesting. They also have a DVD which contains everything, the movie, documentary, subtitles in 34 languages, commentary, production files, and original script and storyboards.

It's a good example of the quality of content that can be created with open tools and techniques. I'm awaiting the time when a full length film could be developed this way.