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Comment by AnotherDesigner | Hacker News Reader

These open movies are great technical demos for Blender but I haven't been impressed with the writing. The stories have been flat, emotionless, poorly paced and lacking in any kind of mass appeal. I'd love to see Blender put out a movie with the depth and complexity of a Pixar film using open-source software. They need a message and a story, something brave and ambitious. So far, it seems like the stories have been written to demo features they're working on. It's really a waste of the amazing talent they have working on these films and the abilities of this software to be used for storytelling.

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To make a Pixar quality film would require a bunch of different world class skillsets. In addition to animators, modellers, riggers, lighters, lookdev artists, fx artists and compositors you'd need writers, editors, sound designers, voice actors etc.

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.

Which is sort of the purpose of the current structure. The studios are under contract and receive funding...

I would also imagine "on budget" will trump most quality or artistic issues in this project...

You have a strange perception of all this. You haven't enjoyed the films, so they are a waste of talent.

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.

Why not just use a piece (an old play for example) that is already in the commons? Or they could request permission from a short story writer that would probably love the exposure.

There is no reason to try to be completely original. There are plenty of great stories out there.

Although little cliched, "Sintel"'s story had great depth and pull. In any case writing good story is hard, their is a reason their is only one "Pixar" .

There is some discussion about the importance of story on the latest edition of Blender Guru.

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.

I don't think the OSS model works for creative works, if everybody can agree on the vision, one would expect it to be bland.

I don't think that has anything to do with the "OSS model". The management/leadership dynamic of FOSS projects can differ from one another just as much as closed projects do.

Lot's of open source projects have very hierarchical or "traditional" structures and management.

The scripts for these Blender works are usually not designed by committee.

I have no knowledge of how this works so I have to ask. How hard would it be to pitch it to a major Hollywood studio?

Well, I am assuming its going to be really really hard to ask someone to part with 6 million Euros for a project that outsider-to-a-industry wants to do, on promise of "maybe" some benefit at end of 2 years :)

Impossibly hard.

I disagree, Caminando was excellent.

Where can I find more info about 'Caminando'?

Caminandes Episode One : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhiWY7XmoY Episode Two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4C82eyhwgU

Those are really good. Thanks for sharing them. I think comedy shorts are a very smart focus.

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