First 'Open' Movie...

brentphillips — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:05:00 GMT

First Open Movie…

I have been fascinated by open source technology and business models for some time - the following caught my attention recently.

Earlier this year, a small team of CG developers and animators, working as part of what is known as the Orange Open Movie Project, completed what they are calling the first fully open film entitled The Elephant’s Dream, released under the Creative Commons license. As part of the effort, project sponsors made the film free to download, along with all supporting files and musical score, giving their audience full access to the content used to create the film. Not surprisingly, custom versions – mostly in the form of videos and short clips – have started popping up from CG enthusiasts. The movie itself runs about 10 minutes and can be downloaded from the website above.

For truly inspired supporters of the project, a DVD set can be ordered online containing all of the above for about 35 Euro (it is also apparently being released as the EU’s first HD DVD title as well).

To summarize, the story is incomplete and, for me personally, was a bit non-specific (I felt like I was dropped into a few pages of a much larger story too complex to grasp in the short glimpse I was given) - but the visuals and score were decent. What interested me from the beginning of the project - specifically - is that it was born out of the Blender Foundation whose 3D Modeling tool was used to develop scenes, characters, and animation sequences.

Blender, if you are not familiar, is a 3D modeling tool that migrated to open-source a few years ago under the leadership of Ton Roosendaal – the program’s creator (also project lead on the film). Briefly, Ton – then owner of the bankrupt design firm NaN - raised funds from CG community members to buy the rights to the software from the company’s investors. 100,000 euros and seven weeks later(according to their website), the solution became open source - offered under the GNU GPL. Since then, Ton has remained head of the Blender Foundation, which is a Dutch non-profit, organized to maintain the core of the software as its primary goal.

As with any open-source project, how Blender grows and how it may or may not evolve into commercial success will be interesting to watch. Not that commercial success is its goal, per se, but I am intrigued at the dynamic evolving around its use. As I mentioned, the foundation is non-profit but its flagship technology (which is incidentally open source with proprietary file formats) is being used by many artists to support their own commercial projects. To me, it seems that the value chain is broken somehow…Contributing developers, I assume, are not paid by the foundation and, I further assume, that not all of them are successful 3d artists (suggesting that they are not benefiting from the capabilities of the tool). All hobbyists? Perhaps. If so, what do they seek to accomplish? Perhaps simply free software (FSF)…Perhaps something more. At any rate, the movie is getting tremendous press at the moment (especially in the EU), and the Blender 3D project seems to be moving forward quite well and at a steady pace.

If anyone from the Blender community cares to offer deeper insight on future direction, please feel free to email me or post here.

Incidentally, Blender is available on Windows (works great on XP), and some of our guys are already getting it setup for Vista’s Windows Presentation Foundation. Check out Daniel Lehenbauer’s blog for additional info…

Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : CG

First 'Open' Movie...