Gooseberry: How to Get Involved?
With the Gooseberry Open Movie Project revving up to get started, more and more people are wondering if and how they can participate. Ton Roosendaal shed some light on his plans today.
Ton writes:With Gooseberry being much larger in scale than previous projects, we also will have much more job openings, and will work on exciting ways for people to be involved or participate.
Openness and sharing is going to be important – but also to realize a top quality film. How to bring both together I’ve written down in the ‘get involved’ page on this site.
Comments and feedback welcome, what do you think? :)
Link
I think the idea of people contributing through the Blender Cloud is in principle very nice. However, I can see that getting out of hand. How much work will it be for the studios to plough through that content to get to what they need and to ensure that it behaves the way they need it to. I guess that first of all, the external contributions will be mainly props, as they can have relatively objective criteria (polycount, texture size, etc.). This as opposed to rigs and such, which the animators will have to closely work with. Then, there should probably be some kind of peer-review system as a first barrier, so the external contributors can first help each other to perfect their work, before the studios spend time on it.
They should check that the work is close enough to the concept art it is based on, that it meets certain limits, that the blend files are organized the way the should be, etc.
that sounds alot like like blendswap
I hope someday there will also come a free place where people can upload every model without such controls, maybe not for this movie, but just because people have created something. I dont care if a teenager or professional creates something; i’m not always looking for high quality, sometimes i’m looking for creativity and originality, and i can use a model and alter it. I think of a free share (torrent share?) thing.
As a painting artist (and stone sculpter) i never contribute works to organizations who rate art.
Because art is better (most often) not to be rated by others, its a proces of the artist, and you can like him/her or not, but thats what that person made. If a teenager draws something i may like it as much as a pro artist. That just depends on what i see in his/her work. And thats my personal rating, not a rating i would like to set upon others. I kinda miss a free site for blender now.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should rate art. I’m also not saying that a beginner (like myself) cannot create something that a pro might like. I’m only talking about the technical aspects that makes the content fit in the workflow. Things like where the origin of an object should be, so the artists on the movie can easily place it in a scene. Or naming conventions. Stuff like that, that I as ah amateur never really care about, but that is important for a big project and that I might actually like to learn.
You’re right on with this comment. Talented beginners can often quickly learn to make models that look good. But learning to control the polygon count and to do good UV mapping takes time and dedication, and those are just two of the things that have to be right for models that are going to be used in a production environment. If a scene is busy and has dozens of characters and hundreds of props all of those props had better have the lowest possible polygon count while still fitting the style of the piece. Good UV mapping also means less memory use for a given level of texture detail, so that’s important too. There are many details like these that must be right, and it takes a fair while to learn them.
i understand its good for making a movie, it is just that i miss something where we could put everything, blenderartist is limited, blendswap is limited, .. everywhere there are rating people who may just have a bad day or just are not in the mood for your work.
Doing a polygon count seams quite simple, and could be just a filter for such site.
As for getting a good style etc, then you need some artist with pen and pencils, (and i asume to companies that participate do it that way), most games are developed like that; then when you agree on drawing styles, you start with raw models, variations, textures ones..baked ones, rigged ones..etc.
Is this gonna be another animation, or live action? They should really concentrate on more live action filmaking projects I think. I suppose it’s easier to keep it as a fantasized animation from a production budget standpoint.
I disagree. All of the Open Movie pure CG projects have been of very high quality, while Tears of Steel was an embarrassment to many of those who took part. While the Blender effects and animation were well done in Tears of Steel the script was weak, the acting weaker and the direction lacking. It seems that the Blender institute understands very well how to make a quality animated short film but judging by Tears of Steel they don’t understand how to do a high quality live action piece. This makes it best for them if they make a pure animated piece.
That’s inconsequential. The main purpose of Tears of Steel, and all of these projects really, is to showcase Blender’s production capabilities. We already know it kicks ass in the animation front, we need more proof-of-concept(s) in live action production.
No, the quality of the movie itself is important because the better it is the more people will see it and talk about it. Remember that some of the people who see these pieces of work might not be thinking of making anything themselves; it’s only if the movie itself is inspiring that they will start to think that way. A poor Open Movie will be seen by a tiny fraction of the number of people that will see a good one. I can easily believe that seeing Elephants Dream would make someone think for the first time “I want to make something as cool as that”. I certainly can’t see that change of thinking happening much with Tears of Steel. To be most effective for the Blender institute the movie needs to be seen as much as possible and talked about as much as possible.
Maybe we’ll never agree on this but that’s my view.