Orange: First Reviews, Sales Hit 2000, Wikipedia Prank

Orange 2?

Ton mentions that the DVD sales have now reached 2000 copies and he’s already speculating about starting another Open Movie project. With the experience the Orange team has accumulated over the last 7 months, I’m sure it would nothing less than a big success. Selling more DVDs will make the changes of another project bigger so if you haven’t ordered your DVD yet, head over to the Blender e-shop now!

Sharing Elephants Dream

Despite Ton’s request to wait with posting Elephants Dream on the Internet until the Orange team has had a chance to publish a good quality version, you can already view it on YouTube. In itself this is not a problem (in fact, you’re encouraged to share it!), but the Orange team is quite disappointed by the quality of it. As they will be releasing a series of high-quality downloads in the next few days, I can only recommend that you wait for those to get the best possible first impression that you can.

Catalan translation falls victim to Wikipedia prank

Here’s another good reason to be cautious about what you read on Wikipedia: Matt writes on the Orange blog that during the final phase of preparing the translations, he looked up the native words for the 30 different languages that they were preparing on Wikipedia.

Exactly during that timeframe, somebody had changed the word for Catalan into an insult, and this word made it into the final DVD set. The Catalan subtitle translator was of course quite upset about this, as was the Orange team. The error has been fixed but obviously they can’t recall the 2000 DVDs that have already shipped. The online version will be ok as will any new DVD batches.

What’s next?

So, next week is going to be exciting. I’m sure that once the movie and production files are available for download, the news will spread rapidly over the web. The Blender.org webservices team (of which I’m a member) is already bracing itself for the impact of Slashdot, Digg and other major news sites. We’ve learned how to survive Slashdot by now, but this might be an event of a somewhat larger magnitude. It’s gonna be fun :-)