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.
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.
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.
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" .
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
It wasn't until I got to the bottom that I realised that they were after money rather than artists donating their time, i think that needs to be more clear from the start.
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!
If rendering is taking a while be sure to check if people still release optimized Blender builds for OS X. I used Blender 5 years ago and I remember the optimized builds where worth it.
Thanks for the tip! I'm using Blender to create artwork for a 3d game, so rendering isn't too much of an issue for me, but will definitely check this out. A quick Google search did turn out a bunch of alternative builds for OS X.
> 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.
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.
I love blender, but I don't think Ton's rationale for not using kickstarter is compelling. Although blender.org gets some page-views, it's the same audience of people who already know about blender. Kickstarter would have introduced a new demographic, and provided more traffic to the blender.org page. Blender is an awesome project, with serious momentum, but I am worry sometimes about Ton's hubris.
Aw man, no bitcoin donor link. I would have thrown some money at this if I didn't have to go through wonky fiat transaction sites I don't use.
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.
Blender is an established and well known and loved product with really decent PR mechanisms so they don't need the visibility one gets on Kickstarter generally, although Kickstarter's fees are relatively low so it probably won't have hurt much.
It isn't really about availability, I'd attribute it more to laziness - once you donate to one project on Kickstarter it is painfully easy to repeat on another half dozen. Having to go through payment forms here might turn a huge portion of potential donors off.
500k Euros is a low amount but they have already raised money from 3 other investors:
[1] European Union
[2] Creative Industries Fund NL
[3] BDO Accountants
