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Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 19, 2006 12:02 PM
from the most-movies-are-so-proprietary dept.
from the most-movies-are-so-proprietary dept.
Joe (and many others) writes "This month has seen the internet release of the first 3D 'Open Movie', Elephants Dream." From the site: "The 3D animated short 'Elephants Dream' will today be released as a free and public download. This is the final stage of a successfully completed Open Movie project which has been community-financed, using only Open Source tools, and opening up the movie itself as well as the entire studio database for everyone to re-use and learn from. The movie and production files are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution."
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Elephants Dream Creator Talks to Wikinews 86 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Three days after the Internet release of the free content 3D short Elephants Dream, Wikinews exchanged e-mails with Ton Roosendaal about the reaction to the film, open source filmmaking, and the changes to Blender that resulted from the production."
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Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Just the free market at work. (Score:2, Interesting)
Projects like this were bound to happen sooner or later. Now that the technology is readily available, the market is able to take care of the problem of overpaid movie stars and distribution companies.
Re:Just the free market at work. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.geoffreyspear.com/)
Re:Just the free market at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://lawpoop.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 28 2004, @06:51PM)
Clearly obvious to geeks, maybe.
The reason that Joe Public goes to see a movie is not for the plot, nor for the special effects, but for the star power. People will see Pirates of the Caribean for Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp, not because it's about pirates.
Even if we replace actual actors with CGI clones, or purely CGI characters develop, it will cost $20 million to license their image, because star power is what draws people to the movies in the first place. The movie industry is one of the freest markets, and I think it's a tough case to make that the money stars make is somehow distorted.
Before it's slashdoted.... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://fak3r.com/)
Only playable in: VLC Media Player [videolan.org] MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu]
Re:Before it's slashdoted.... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://fak3r.com/)
http://www.tribler.org/content/Elephants_Dream_HD
Zonk Title Sense Make Little Gah! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://evil.google.com/)
And That's not all... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1066346/)
Elephants Only Web Dream Release? Huh? (Score:2, Funny)
Any information at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://neilmcallister.com/)
Re:Any information at all? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://fak3r.com/)
Elephants Dream is a story with quick-witted dialogue, tightly designed architecture and unusual sound effects. The main characters, Emo (a cool young trumpeter) and Proog (a confused - or maybe not? - loner) are each stuck in a world of their own. At a certain moment they cross paths with one another. The oddball Proog cautiously tries to introduce his young friend Emo to his world. When Emo realizes that Proog primarily wants to push his ideas on him, this leads to a conflict between them. But can Emo survive in Proog's world? And can they overcome their conflicts, or will they each go their own way in life? Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen create two unique personalities that command the imagination, and carry the viewer along into a bizarre world that consists of a bleak wasteland with a tangle of cables and other alien landscapes, a living typewriter, an enormous elevator shaft, and especially a lot of very strange birds.
Also checkout the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants_Dream [wikipedia.org]
Re:Any information at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
In reality, it is two weirdos running through psychedelic landscapes and talking mostly nonsense. The graphics are very well done and quite imaginative, and the big battle at the end is cool - the Colossus rocks, even if we see just a hand.
But no, this thing has no real plot. Sorry. It just doesn't. It is, essentially, a demo. Perfectly understandable, since the whole point of this project was to see if you can make a movie with free open source tools, and a success as such - but for this very reason the whole script is simply and excuse to show as many special effects as possible. They are very good, and the whole thing is quite entertaining in its own surreal way - but the description you gave assigns it philosophical qualitites it just doesn't have.
Don't get me wrong, movie makers: your work is truly amazing. However, you if the description given was what you wanted to say, you failed. The reason for this failure was giving too much priority for FX, and failure to give the viewer any frame of reference (maybe you should have shown the two people meeting instead of starting from the middle of their journey ?). This improved somewhat near end, but most of the movie was just too surreal to carry any recognizable meanings.
So, basically: a huge technological success, mediocre at best in storytelling, characters simply didn't interact enough with each other (or anything else) to develop any personality beyond simple "youth curious, old forbids him" stereotype.
Nice surreal tech demo, but only that.
Re:Any information at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
While the scenery, effects and character modeling were intriguing and really really well done, the character animation was odd and crude.
The voice acting and dialog not just lack any logic or consistency but were flat out annoying.
One would wonder why they spent all those resources and time on creating this animation but didn't care to get a decent screenplay at first.
All in all, it may've used OSS tools, but they followed the good ol' Hollywood paradigm: all effects and the story sucks.
Huh... it must be "art". (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @04:02PM)
With no background, the viewer is thrown successively into four or five disjointed sequences where the same two characters move through a ludicrously-impossible "machine" which has no apparent purpose.
I thought I must surely have only seen the trailer. No, that was the whole film.
The voice for "Emo" was very wrong somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Might it have been done by several different people? No reference at all to Elephants.
The "description" in the parent to this article is bogus because half of the things it mentions aren't even in the film! There was no "quick-witted dialog" because there was hardly any dialog at all. Emo is a trumpet player? That wasn't in the film. Proog is a loner? In the film he's always with Emo. Proog doesn't "cautiously introduce" anything, but shouts "Follow me!" before dashing along narrow, railless, flipping catwalks with hostile bird-things swooping about. If Emo feels that Proog is pushing his ideas, well, I can't imagine what those ideas are since the guy doesn't say much of anything except that the machine is "beautiful". These characters don't have any conflicts to work out, except where Emo wants to go through a door with calliope music coming from behind it and begs like a three-year-old.
This film doesn't "carry" the viewer at all. It drags the viewer, kicking and screaming, through complex scenes with no coherence. One reaches the credits and says, "What was that about?"
Yah. Must be "art".
NOOOOO (Score:5, Funny)
Elephant's Dream (Score:5, Funny)
Also from the site:
> 425MB (USA #1)
Not for long, it won't be.
(Where are an elephant's genitals located? In his feet. Because if he steps on you, you're fucked. Any parallels between a webserver with a 425 MB .avi file that just got linked on the front page of Slashdot are purely coincidental.)
A start, I suppose (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://suen.ed.psu.edu/~bkemp/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 26 2006, @10:46AM)
Re:A start, I suppose (Score:5, Informative)
(http://mke3.net/)
Hopefully when the release fuss dies down I'll blog about it and try and get some help. In any case, those who condemn others for not using open formats should actually try and use them themselves. I'm sure Theora would get used a lot more if it were easy, or even at least possible for content producers (i.e. artists, not developers) to actually use. My experience hasn't shown that to be the case so far.
Cheers
Matt
Teasers / Trailers for the impatient (Score:4, Informative)
(http://fak3r.com/)
30MB MPEG4 [blendertestbuilds.de] (blendertestbuilds.de)
Update Oct 17: Here are some other mirrors and compressed versions made by the community!
24MB MPEG [thepiratebay.org] (BitTorrent)
9MB Xvid/Vorbis OGM [ourmedia.org]
i can't wait (Score:3, Funny)
A little more info (Score:3, Informative)
(http://lawpoop.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 28 2004, @06:51PM)
"Elephants Dream is a computer-generated [slashdot.org] movie made using open source [slashdot.org] applications [slashdot.org] that premiered on March 24 [slashdot.org], 2006 [slashdot.org]. Beginning production in September, 2005 [slashdot.org], it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the way the script was developed.
The film was first announced in May, 2005 [slashdot.org] by Ton Roosendaal [slashdot.org], the chairman of the Blender Foundation [slashdot.org] and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender [slashdot.org]. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute [slashdot.org]. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 [slashdot.org] has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm [slashdot.org] time for the movie.
The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software [slashdot.org] and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.
During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1] [blender.org], were added into Blender especially for the project.
The film's content was released under the Creative Commons [slashdot.org] Attribution license [2] [blender.org], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video [slashdot.org] version as a computer file, and all the production files.
The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.
"Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation [slashdot.org]; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License [slashdot.org]".
Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers [slashdot.org].
High Definition (1920x) torrent now available (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://fak3r.com/)
http://www.tribler.org/content/Elephants_Dream_HD [tribler.org]
Leave those windows open when you go to Lunch people!
Project background (Score:4, Informative)
Multi-core (Score:4, Funny)
By this price... (Score:1)
Won't someone think of the fluffers? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
And I thought the Elephant's Dream... (Score:4, Funny)
Well... I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://simplesmente.com/)
also means that I could download the 3d models they used and create
my own film stories, TV commercial, product endorsements, pron, etc...
Is there any "open source", copyright-free 3d model characters out there
that one could just grab and use ?
311MB (Score:3, Funny)
Obvisously a technology demonstration (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.chromecode.com/)
Re:Obvisously a technology demonstration (Score:5, Funny)
or George Lucas
How good is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://figz.com/)
All the comments seem to be focused on the open source aspect, which is cool and very important. However, did anyone actually watch this movie?
I watched it the other day (I think it was on digg or boing boing or something). I thought it was insanely bad. It was like I came in halfway through some crazy anime. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I couldn't even begin to figure out what the characters were suppose to be feeling or thinking.
This has a cool factor going for it, but man it was painful to watch. The 3D work was well done as far as textures and models, but the animation seemed really awkward and bad.
I don't think anyone should be patting themselves on the backs too hard yet. If this is what the open source model can produce for entertainment, then I don't think Pixar has much to fear.
However, the possibility for movie remixes should be pretty cool.
Can't see in xine? (Score:2)
Its just like Windows then ? (Score:2)
(http://www.webgeekworld.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 27 2006, @07:47AM)
What? (Score:5, Funny)
* Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
> Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
* Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
> Say, do you have any psychological problems?
More resources (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://charon.sjs.org/~drew)
If you're interested in some more resources for Blender (or info on the movie), try checking these places out:
Blendernation [blendernation.com]
Blendernation article about Elephants Dream [blendernation.com]
Blender Artists Forums [blenderartists.org]
Collection of WikiBooks [wikibooks.org]
Elephants Dream on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (in case you don't know anything about it, considering the main website is down and the original poster didn't say much of anything about the short itself)
Blender on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Seriously, though, considering how much has been happening with this project, and what a significant milestone it is for those who use OSS and/or CC, I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year [slashdot.org]. And that it took Slashdot editors well over a day since the first story submissions (some with links directly to the torrents to avoid killing the Elephants Dream homepage immediately) to get this up. Maybe I'm biased (I pre-ordered the DVD 9 months ago), but I just think that stories about people doing amazing things within and beyond the community deserves precedence over the latest reports about what the PS3 might cost. Not to anger anyone, just to toss that up for discussion.
Okay, the script needs some work... (Score:1)
It is Not Possible That This Movie Exists (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.a4fs.net/blog/)
So where's the Rotten Tomatoes entry? (Score:1)
(http://www.geocities.com/mogomra/ | Last Journal: Friday June 06 2003, @04:03PM)
IMDB? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://chochos.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 09 2007, @05:48PM)
Also, it would be cool to have a downloadable ISO, to burn directly to a DVD and watch on a TV instead of in the computer. It's also an easier way to pass it around to non-tech people who would like to watch it.
Wow (Score:2)
Why Ask Why? (Score:2)
New area for zealots (Score:1)
(http://www.thorsen-consulting.dk/)
And someone can give a fantastic speech about embedding the attack into the movie "compiler".
Anyone Interested In Making a Re-Edit? (Score:2, Interesting)
Then we get to the plot/story/dialog.
Being nice...it was incomprehensible. Being not so nice...poop.
Anyway, I think the thing has some great potential. Is there anyone here interested in perhaps re-writing the story and redoing character voices? I'd be more than willing to help with the writing and editing the story.
Reply under this post if you'd like to help, and I'll try and get something going.
[C]
I knew this day would come..... (Score:5, Funny)
request: upload it to Google Video- (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday May 24 2005, @09:00PM)
M$ MPEG? (Score:2)
It was a let-down for me (Score:1)
(http://blog.skudd.com/ | Last Journal: Monday January 10 2005, @09:28PM)
I realize that Orange has done a lot for the Blender community, in terms of development of Blender itself. But I feel that with the time and effort that has been put into "Elephant's Dream", it could have been, well... better.
I know I seem to be a bit whiny about this, but given the hype and such, I expected quite a bit more. Perhaps Orange felt that if nobody liked the movie they could modify it to fit their needs... Had I the spare time, manpower, and overall skill, I would gladly embark on such a task. However, I don't know that the 425MB over my 256Kbit DSL was wort