We first reported about the Argentinean movie project Plumiferos two months ago. Since then, much progress has been made and it's about time for an update.
The movie
“It's an everyday universe that exists 7 feet over our heads. They are city birds that you can find in every tree or every corner.â€
Plumiferos is the movie project of the Argentinean studio Manos Digitales. It will be a 75 minute long feature film and it is created entirely in Blender. Like Elephants Dream, this one will put Blender (and open source software in general) firmly on the map as a professional movie making tool.
Concept art
Like any CG movie project, this one was started off with the traditional arts:
Manos Digitales artist team, formed by Alejandro Barbesi, AgustÃn Bobillo and Rubén Gonzalez, directed by Bernardo Lozada and Emanuel Biscardi, is responsible to shape the director's vision in every one of this details: character design and their facial and corporal expressions, color and texture tests, set design and coloring, climate design for the scenes, scene storyboarding and layout, props and cloth design, and even architectonic innovations.
In order to do that, they use different techniques, from pencil sketches, traditional painting, sculpture, photographic assembly and a lot of research. Every element that you'll see in the big screen, requires days and even weeks of work and discusion, until it is made in 3D.
The team has shared some of their early sketches on their production diary.
Production
The production diary has a description of the team's current activities: rigging setup, character shading setup, Python scripting, animation and lighting and photography and they describe each of these in some detail. All the work looks exceptional; be sure to also check out the test animations. My favourite is a test of the main character, Juan. You'll have to see this animation at least a few times to take in all the action!
New team member
Pablo Vazquez (VenomGFX) has become part of the team. Pablo is one of my favourite Blender artists and he has made many appearances in the Blender.org gallery. He has a uniquely vibrant and crazy style and I am sure that he will leave his imprint on the final product. The Plumiferos blog hints that more well-known Blender users will make a guest appearance!
Upcoming Trailer
The team will have a High Definition trailer ready somewhere during the next few weeks. The old trailer was already looking amazing, so I can't wait for the new one!
9 Comments
This is very cool. It's quite inspiring to see the concept art and resulting 3D scenes and characters that evolved from it. I look forward to future updates.
I don't think the link to the test-movie of the main char is correct.. It shows birds on wire.
@postlogic: I think it is; the birds are all instances of Juan doing crazy stuff. Well, even if it isn't, this is the link I had meant to include :)
It looks amazing.
I believe it is, as bart said, several instances of the same character. It is an "easy" way to see a lot of variations of action for a single character.
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I really love this movie project, the mood, the characters it's amazing. I saw the trailer at BConf-2005 and shame that it didn't get that much interest as Elephants Dream. I was amazed about the trailer and the coolness the only thing that made me a little disappointed was there weren't subtitles in the trailer, but who cares, the cg looks great. :D
I hope when this movie comes out they have at least subtitles since I can't understand it. Now VenomGFX joined the team, it even made me more curious how the full lenght movie would look like. I really like the artworks of VenomGFX.
Guys keep going this project rocks. :)
hi everybody excuse me i don't speak english well, but i have some problem can you explain me how can i dowload blender
@yvan: you can download Blender from http://blender.org/cms/Download.13.0.html
Nice!
is it in English? and is it an open source movie like elephants dream?
i sure hope so, lol
good luck with the movie!
@bart: Haha, sorry. I'm an idiot. I'm too caught up with VenomGFX's humanoid characters, and thought it was supposed to be a humanoid. After actually READING about the project, I now see that I'm an idiot.
Yay.