Durian Video

Sintel, the Pre-Premiere

Bart ·

Due to family circumstances I couldn’t make it to last night’s Sintel Pre-premiere. However, Ali Boubred has posted an excellent video impression of the event, and BlenderArtists’ Roel Spruit (mislabeled as the ‘BlenderNation dude’ in the video ;-) wrote up a short report on the event for us. Thanks guys!

Roel writes:

On Sunday the 18th of July a group of 150 blenderheads attended the pre-premiere of the Blender Institute’s latest short film “Sintel”. After a nice reception by the Durian team outside Studio-K in Amsterdam, a small cinema rented off for the occasion, we headed into the theater where Ton Roosendaal gave a short introduction. Because it was a pre-premiere we were warned that some aspects of the movie were not finished yet, primarily the colourgrading and some shots that showed rendering errors. We were also warned not to bootleg the movie! This is also the reason this review does not contain specific details about the storyline or the twists and turns of the movie. After the introduction the show began and we were treated to the first ever screening of Sintel!

A review of a movie is always subjective. As someone who followed the progress of Blender for the last decade and saw the last projects the Blender Institute did, I can say that the Durian team really delivered a great movie. The storytelling was very, very good and the structure of the movie was surprising and not too “run-off-the-mill”. There were some younger viewers in the audience and their reactions were equally enthousiastic, although the movie might have been a bit scary in some places. Showing the movie to an audience that use Blender themselves must have been daunting for the team, since the slightest flaw gets magnified. I tried to look at the movie from a non-technical point of view and I was very entertained and impressed at the same time. There were some color issues and artifacts here and there but that is to be expected from an early-final version. Comparing it to the previous (movie) projects by the Blender Institute, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny, I feel Sintel is a good combination of the mood and visuals of ED and the storytelling and accesibility of BBB.

After the movie was shown we were treated to 15 minutes of the “Making Of” by Ali Boubred. He followed the team around for the entire production process and did some great interviews with all the team members (he shot 1800 hours of film!). I look forward to seeing the documentary in full when the project is really, really finished.

Then it was off to the bar where the movie was, of course, the main topic of conversation. An event such as this is always an opportunity for me to meet some of my old Blender friends and I was glad to see so many people made the trip for this special occasion. There were even some family members from the team present, some even travelled from the states just to be there! We had the bar to ourselves until 01:00 in the morning so you can imagine we had a good time!

Roel Spruit

I guess I’ll just go and grow myself a goatee now.

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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