People Press

Interview with Ton in Linux User & Developer Magazine

Bart ·


Remixing the source

Not only the software we used was open source, but the entire studio database had been published (under a Creative Commons licence). That’s crazy, and has never been done before. I think we deserve the claim that Elephants Dream is an ‘open movie’. We did have some remarks about the audio part, but then Blender is a computer graphics project. We couldn’t afford to include open source audio, and I have no idea how to manage it. We found a studio sponsor for music and the soundtrack, and it did use open source in the studio, but not exclusively, because there was no open source audio development involved. We might do that for next time, but it would have to be organised by an open source audio project, that would participate and help out the team to get it done.

Also, because we wanted cinematic quality, everything was rendered in 2K high definition; the audio soundtrack had to be 5.1 surround, Dolby, theatre quality. That’s still little bit of a problem with open source production. I hope sometime it will be there, and we can support that.

Another nice thing with making this movie open and freely available is that it has become a sort of reference standard for high definition television. There was a big broadcasting convention in Amsterdam, with five or six big halls, the whole European broadcasting community presenting for ten days. I heard that at least ten different booths were showing Elephants Dream on high definition TV. That’s mostly because there’s a big lack of high definition content. You can do it with a camera, but cameras are noisy and it doesn’t look that crispy. If you have the original 3D renderings we published from Elephants Dream and you show them on a high definition screen, it looks so crispy.

The first European HD-DVD title was Elephants Dream; a German company published it. It’s a commercial product but we don’t get anything from it – that’s fine, it gives Elephants Dream a bigger audience and distribution. I’ve lost count of the number of TV stations that have shown Elephants Dream; I just heard that the main Argentinian TV channel showed it. It’s impossible to keep track of everything; the same for festivals and awards.

The moment we finished the project we had to move on to other things, and since Elephants Dream is open and free, everyone said we should submit it this or that festival. I said ‘Please submit it yourself! I can’t do all of that, it’s too much work!’ So a lot of people have been submitting it themselves, and we’ve had a couple of awards.

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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