Support an open source animation feature film made with Blender
gooseberry.blender.org
gooseberry.blender.org
http://www.blenderguru.com/podcast-beorn-leonard-working-on-...
It's a good interview with Beorn Leonard, one of the animators on Sintel, and most recently the Lego movie.
In addition to all that you'd need some sort of top down project management structure. If the people who are directing/supervising the project decide one of the sequences that a bunch of people have worked on for 6 months isn't working, they need to be able to make the decision to abandon the work without causing massive animosity and have people quit the project.
I would also imagine "on budget" will trump most quality or artistic issues in this project...
There is no reason to try to be completely original. There are plenty of great stories out there.
As if these people weren't bogged down working for blender movies, they'd have jobs at Pixar. These people apply to get on the project and they are hand picked crews. They in some cases get to live on the "campus" and work on the film. Everybody benefits, the film is released for free in dozens of file formats / resolutions.
the residual benefits are big, the educational benefits are obvious. Some of the crew have gone on to bigger paid work including pixar and the lego movie, and that's just the popular recent ones. Others create their own companies, others work more on blender and do what they want.
To say it's a waste of talent is very strange way of looking at this.
Some tips that might help to get even more supporters:
* There should really be some kind of 'Tweet this' or 'Facebook this' link at the end of the payment process.
* It's not very visible that you don't need to enter your home address at the registration page.
* The 'Bronze', 'Silver' and 'Gold' sponsor pledges are only visible at the donation page, not on the main site.
* The homepage could explain better why you're writing 'film history' by donating. The headline is 'Support an open source animation feature film'. That sounds a bit tame. Why not use a headline like 'Be part of the world's first feature-length open source animated movie?'
* Tell us more about the movie. How many minutes will it run? Who are the main characters? Who will voice the characters?
I've started learning Blender recently. I had some previous experience with 3ds max and was afraid of the learning curve, but I must say I really like Blender so far. After I picked up the shortcuts and configured it to work properly with my MacBook Pro's trackpad, it's a really pleasant experience.
So if like me you're considering whether to give Blender a try... go for it, don't be afraid of what people say about the learning curve. It's worth it!
Blender has had a not-quite-earned bad reputation in the past for not being very user friendly. After the big UI redesign (which changed how it works, not only how it looks) that was started in Blender 2.5 and has now matured, I find Blender to be quite easy to work.
I have used Blender since the 1.x days when it still was a closed source product developed by the NaN company that went bankrupt. Back then it certainly wasn't easy to use, you had to know which keys to press and they were quite poorly documented. Thankfully the tutorials were good and Blender became popular enough that the source code was eventually bought and open sourced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQbYXPmqiA
A post-2.5 video of mine (2011):
Last I heard, they said it would happen after a Mac version is released, but it's hard to find more info.
500k Euros is absurdly low for an animated film. I'm worried that by not using a popular crowdfunding service they won't have the visibility or at least retention to reach their goal.
I do think this is the future of film - no, information - creation in general. It is just missing investors insurance in case the project fails to get mass market appeal. But it lets us just toss that outdated corrupting copyright regime we have right now.
I hope this changes.