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Interview with Ton in Linux User & Developer Magazine

Bart ·

Dreaming in 3D

Because of my background in an animation studio, I knew that when developing a 3D tool with the complexity of Blender, it’s important to be very close to the artists. They are the people who should define how the software should work. That’s very difficult to extract from the thousands of feature requests on a website. What would be the most wanted or most useful addition to the software? There are a lot of things you could work on. From my practise, I know that if you give a team an assignment, of making a movie short in six months, they will quickly find out that maybe 90% of the feature requests are nice, but you don’t need them to make a movie. So the artists quickly go to the core, key things that you really have to fix, otherwise you can’t make the movie. That focus is incredible, and also inspires the developers to help this small team of artists to get it done. That’s why I would love to have more projects like Elephants Dream.

We started the Elephants Dream project by partnering with a Dutch art institute that specialised in video art – very crazy, weird stuff, like dripping water for five hours. They also challenged us to make something that had an abstract, artistic level; experiment with alternative or non-linear storytelling, develop our own concepts. That’s what I’m really proud of, because I worked first behind the scenes to get the whole organisation set up, including the financing. So before I even announced it in public, I knew that this project was going to be realised. Because of the financing, there was no burden for the team to make something commercial, or something that would sell. It was up to them – they could decide what to make, and it was their personal vision.

I talked at SIGGRAPH this summer to a couple of people from the movie industry. The biggest compliment they made is that they said ‘Wow, it looks good!’ The animation quality, rendering quality, modelling, looks like it’s been done with a professional product. For Blender, that’s a big leap forward, definitely. A couple of people criticised the story, the editing; it’s sometimes a little bit jerky. But that’s OK – they should have been there during production! The team put six people together who didn’t know each other before. They had to finish something in six months.

Before you have a team of people who can work together, it takes a lot of time. Actually, the movie had to be made in two, or two and a half months. The first three or four months we used for design and ideas, getting up to speed and getting the software ready. In the end, people were making one or two minutes of animation in a week, which is a lot. I would have loved to keep the team together for another year; then we could have made a whole movie!

Also, it was obvious at the end that the scenes we did at the beginning lacked quality. It’s a luxury we didn’t have, but you should go back to the editing room, cut the movie in pieces, establish it again, and make some more scenes. But we only had a limited amount of money, so that was it.

Preparation time isn’t usually included in the production time of a movie. Most movies start one or two years before the production starts, on the script, storyboarding and pre-visualisation, that kind of thing – you can do everything right. We had to do all of that in six months. For the next project I will try to have better pre-production, so that when the team is together we can get into actual production. It depends on a new partner, how long we can work on it and how big the team is.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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