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 Elephant's Dream,
an 11 minute animation which premiered on the Internet earlier this
month, describes itself as an 'open movie'. It was animated on the open
source (ie user-built, free and modifiable) 3D package Blender,
has been distributed, with the soundtrack, under a Creative Commons (ie
free to copy and distribute) license - and almost all the tools used in
its creation were open source. Furthermore it provided an early outing
for an EU backed project spanning 6 countries - the open source UniVerse
- which allows 3D animators in different countries to connect their
computers and 3D software to collaborate more closely. The film is an
allegorical of a hopeful boy and embittered man travelling through the
internal workings of nightmarish machine that responds to their every
move, that could be seen as a tantalising showcase of the sort of work
that can be created with little more than patience, a computer and web
access.
Creative Commons Interview with Ton Roosendaal about Elephants Dream and free content movies
From Wikinews, the free news source you can write
Three days after the Internet release of the free content 3D short Elephants Dream (see Wikinews coverage), we 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. Ton Roosendaal is the lead developer of the Blender 3D rendering and modelling software that was used for the movie. He is also the chairman of the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization which was formed in support of the software and projects like Elephants Dream.
How much money did the Blender Foundation spend on producing the
movie? Has the money been fully recouped by DVD orders and donations?
We still have to finish the final bookkeeping for this project. It
has been executed in co-production with the Netherlands Media Art
Institute, and we each had our own internal budgeting for the project.
When you exclude expenses of pre-production and producer personnel, the
total budget was about 120,000 €, of which we covered half. Our
contribution was roughly covered half by the DVD sales, and half by
European Union support (http://www.uni-verse.org consortium).
One of the most common criticisms of CGI films is focus on technology over content. For instance, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
flopped with audiences, in spite of being an undisputed technical
milestone. I've seen many reviews that criticized the plot of
"Elephants Dream" as too bizarre or confusing. In retrospect, are you
happy with the story development process?
Haha, I knew the story and plot would get a mixed acclaim. There's a couple of reasons I'd like to mention for it.
First of all; the criticism resembles how people witness Blender
itself, too. Many people expect that Free Software is an easy
accessible mass audience product. We get a lot of complaints by
non-artists that they can't get into the software easily, whilst the
complexity of commercial products like Maya or Houdini is perceived as
a confirmation of its "quality". Apparently an Open Movie created
similar expectations with the audience.
Luckily we also got many positive reviews of the artistic result of
the movie. It is quite abstract, but definitely has many layers of
information, inspiring many of the viewers to see relevant real life
messages hidden here.
For this project we've teamed up with the Netherlands Media Art
Institute, internationally renowned as a resource for video art. So for
Elephants Dream, we've had the luxury to challenge ourselves to
create real independent artistic content as well. The artists had a lot
of freedom from the start; they were responsible for the concept, story
and creative development of the entire movie. This has resulted in a
lot of quite personal choices, based on what the artists liked to do
themselves. I really cherish such an approach, it has resulted in a
very motivated team working crazy hours the last months to get it all
realized.
But, most importantly; the main target of our project was not only
to create a 3D movie short, but to experiment with ways to improve the
efficiency and quality of open source development. On this aspect only,
this project was just a huge success, and the main reason for our
sponsors (the DVD pre-sale) to support it. I know they might have liked
a cartoonish funny movie with furry animals better, but for that you
get already pretty well served by the bigger 3D animation studios. :)
I'm the first to admit that - looking back especially - certain
aspects worked out quite weakly; there's loose ends and questionable
decisions, especially in story development and continuity. That's just
the risk of doing experiments, and nothing I regret really. The five
artists from our user community who were invited to make the movie were
young people with no professional background in filmmaking. Their
personal incentive to participate in this project was also to learn
from it, and to create a good portfolio for their future career. I've
witnessed them grow in competence in the past year enormously,
something I'm incredibly proud of.
 On the technical level, the only major criticism I've seen of
"Elephants Dream" is the character animation, especially in the opening
scene -- many reviewers felt that the movements seemed a bit unnatural.
Do you agree with these criticisms? If so, what do you think can be
done to improve on that level?
Yeah, the challenge the artists set themselves - to use quite
realistic personages - is also something that easily works against you.
In many animation movies they introduce characters in the beginning in
a way you get used to their specific characteristic movements, so you
accept a certain level of non-realism easily. (Check the weird walk
cycles in The Incredibles for example). Another aspect is that
we've started work on the first scenes, and ended with the last scenes.
I can clearly see the animation quality increase, and that whilst the
ending scenes were done in much less time due to time constraints.
We also didn't schedule to do 9.5 minutes of animation either….
Originally it was more like 6. But, it's always easier to look back to
define the right decisions, eh? :)
I'm very happy with the reviews we got so far; luckily the movie was
perceived as a professional quality product, and reviewed based on
comparisions with what the big studios come up with. Even when we
couldn't satisfy all these quality demands, it has luckily not been
branded as a pathetic presumptuous attempt by amateurs!
Do you think there is hope for a full-length open movie project
in the near future? Would the Blender Foundation be interested in such
a project, or do you intend to continue focusing mainly on shorts?
I'd like to wait a little while with defining what a next project
would look like. Given the constraints of "organizing projects to
improve open source development", we might have not much choice either.
It would probably mean to work with a new team each time, so most
likely be based on shorts only. On the other hand, there's also clear
signals that this approach works well, and creates excitement and
involvement of a lot of people, also from producers and sponsors. That
might enable us to set up a next project based on larger targets. For a
full-length feature film however, we should involve a sufficient amount
of experienced film makers as well, and/or invite the first team to
participate again. That would put a lot of pressure on the required
budget…. You can't do that based on a 1000 DVD pre-sale target. Would
more be like 20,000 or so…. :)
How did the process of making the movie feed back into the
development of Blender? Are there major technical changes that were
made only or primarily because of the film?
Already during the pre-production phase the artists have defined the
key targets for Blender development. This then was coordinated with the
online development community too. I've done the most crucial
(re-)development mostly myself, though. Especially on the character
animation tools, on the rendering pipeline and compositing tools.
It is especially the latter I'm most satisfied with. In 3D movie
production the compositing stage creates a giant content bottleneck. By
transparently integrating this in our render-pipeline, a very efficient
workflow has been achieved. And, not to forget, Blender now also offers
the first production-level open source compositer on the market!
The current summary you can find in our work-in-progress release notes.
What are the key technical features in Blender you want to add or improve for future movie projects?
Depends on what the movie is about! There's always hundreds of
features you can work on. However, we'll have to work on that anyway,
movie project or not. There's a lot of professionals using Blender now, and they can't wait for the Blender Foundation to do movies! Look at this studio for example: http://www.plumiferos.com/
I read that at least one proprietary software package, Reaktor,
was used for the sound effects. Is this because no equivalent free
software solution exists yet? Will future projects have a "free
software only" policy?
We've limited the "Open Source tools" requirement to our own Studio
Orange only. That was what we could keep in control at least, and I can
tell you it was not always easy even... :)
For sound and music we've decided from the beginning to seek an
external sponsor. We have chosen to work with the best quality studio
and composer we could find, preferably using open source, but not as a
prerequisite.
My own competence is solely within the CG [computer graphics, Ed.]
side of movie making. When it comes to music editing, or video encoding
and DVD authoring, I could only decide to choose to work with external
parties with proven competences in that area. I have to be practical in
projects like this, especially to ensure it will be realized.
Hopefully, now we've got so much attention world wide, we can
involve more non-CG open source next time, too. I will definitely
strive for the maximum here, but it will fully depend on the amount of
professional support we can get.
Blender itself was originally closed source freeware, until it
was "liberated" through a fundraising campaign. If you could choose one
proprietary application to "set free" where such a goal could be
realistically achieved, which one would it be?
Well, the "realistically achieved" demand makes it quite difficult. :) Looking back at similar cases, like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org,
it was always very circumstantial. It just happens sometimes, you can't
organize something like this to happen in advance. The only common
denominator is "a company in troubles"… so, who's in trouble now?
What is your personal favorite computer-animated full-length film?
Uuuh… that differs every week! Probably Ice Age
(the first one). Mostly because they didn't overdo showcasing 3D
technology so much, but created truly adorable characters and great
funny gags.
This Creative Commons interview originally appeared on WikiNews and can be read here
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