Open Source On the Big Screen 120
An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks about the making of the world's first open movie and offers some advice to others wanting to start such a project."
Success (Score:5, Insightful)
Other projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
Elephant's Dream was a huge technical achievement, but the final work was an abject failure as a film. A "movie" isn't just a series of pictures that appear to move when displayed in rapid succession. Tell me something. Move me. Give me a character I have a fighting chance of identifying with.
Do something to transcend mere moving-pictureness.
-Peter
Re:Good things coming from the Blender crowd (Score:2, Insightful)
Success of Elephants Dream? (Score:5, Insightful)
While it was cute to make an open-source film, it would also have been nice to have a decent plot and scripting. I've seen many better stories in flash on newsgrounds. Heck, I've seen better plots on ytmnd.com.
Re:Youtube (Score:3, Insightful)
The Pixar Shorts (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to understand the difference between a tech demo and a movie - and how the evolution of a story teaches you mastery of your craft - you need look no farther than this: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 [amazon.com] [Blu-Ray $20]
Re:Youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll admit that Elephants Dream is a bit strange, but its certainly not dull. In fact, unsurprisingly, it sort of exists as a tech demo of what Blender can do, which makes watching it on YouTube rather akin to brail pr0n.
Your other comments are both absurd, Blenders renderer is state of the art, and quite competitive with anything Max can produce as the gallery will contest, plus it has Yafray which kicks arse. As for the GUI, 3D graphics is complicated, and so are the GUI's. A professional learns multiple GUIs and accepts that each has its pluses and minuses. Lesser peons learn just one interface and bash the others when they turn out to be different.
Re:Youtube (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Conceptual success (Score:4, Insightful)
producing quality content for films.: It really wasn't quality at all, I didn't find anything impressive at all in regards to the animation or texture/overall look. So even disregarding the plot I found it substandard.
and secondly, if it had been a story that was actually INTERESTING then maybe they would have helped their cause so, so much more. ("Man, did you see that crazy [funny/sad/emotional] cg film on the net... that was awesome" "I did, and did you know it was completely done with FREE software! Crazy... crazy") By ignoring a plot and any semblance of making it at all engaging they by and large wasted their efforts. A little bit of pre planning/script writing would have gone a LOOOOONG way.
Re:Success? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Hollywood and conventional wisdom have perverted the term "success" for their own power so that it implies "commercial success".
A more general definition is "an achievement of an objective or goal". To some extent, this is rather arbitrary but having created my own movies [metaphrast.com] (all videos licensed under Creative Commons), I would say that it would be a success for them to just finish it.
Now, to inject my own selfish opinion into the argument of the definition of what success might be for an "Open" project like this, I would list the following, "an work that makes a positive contribution to the culture of humanity". It doesn't have to be a large contribution, but as long as people can gain something from it (a lesson, some entertainment, faith and hope) then it would qualify in my mind as a "success".
This is what I aim for when I mark a publication with the Creative Commons license (which, in addition to the movies, includes this [metaphrast.com]).
Re:Youtube (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it won't. For a given task in a given UI, there is a way to do so with the minimum number of keypresses / mouselicks / whatever. This minimum number varies from UI to UI; the UI with the smallest minimum will also be fastest, because no matter how well you learn a given UI, your speed is still limited by the physical limits of your body. You simply can't press the buttons infinitely fast no matter how much you practice, so the less of them you have to press to accomplish a task, the faster you can perform it.
That said, I have no idea if Blender's UI is fast, slow or average; I couldn't make sense of it when I last tried it, and have resigned to doing my modelling with Povray scripts. I guess that tells something about the user friendliness of Blender :(...
Re:Blender (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Youtube (Score:1, Insightful)
They entered it into every "proper" film festival and got nowhere. The animation industry isn't taking the film seriously at all.
The only "success" they had was to identify faults and shortcomings in the software when used to make a short film. They were beta testers. The Blender community looked up to them, and were ultimately disappointed.
Re:Youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Sign of times to come... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares if it sucks? Fantasmagoria [youtube.com] wasn't exactly an amazing piece of work by today's standards, but as the world's first cartoon (1908) it was a good indicator of things to come.
Yes, including your beloved Family Guy...
This is a trend-setting movie, underscored by the woes of the MPAA and RIAA. Media is moving away from centralized cathedrals and moving inexorably towards individualized bazaars. Nothing that the **AA can do will change this fact, since it's really a consequence of technology getting forever cheaper.
The plot is weak, the voice acting is terrible. But like Fantasmagoria, it kicks off a trend of forever-improving material.
Not this again!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's always one.
Blender was a fantastic UI which is very powerful if you haven't been polluted by other interfaces. But that's okay, you go back to using notepad, I'm happy with vi.
Moaning about the blender interface on /. is about as useful and interesting as me moaning about how slow and complicated Photoshop is to use because it's not like the GIMP. Seriously it took me a few minutes to figure out how to resize an image in Photoshop recently because I haven't used it in about seven years.
"Blender's UI sux" comments have been done to death. They are boring and pointless. If you have a need to use it, learn the UI, otherwise quit whining, or go and whine at say 3D Max developers for creating a UI that is so slow and inefficient and takes so much unhealthy mouse work to get basic things done that they have forever closed your mind to new possibilities.