Interview with Ton Roosendaal
Three Dutch students traveled to Amsterdam to inverview Ton. It’s a great interview and it’s fully subtitled.
A few weeks ago me and two friends were assigned to do a presentation at school about a topic of our own choosing. We chose movies, and one of the subjects covered was CGI. An interview with someone relating to your subject was mandatory, so we mailed around to everybody we could think of.Ton Roosendaal was one of them, and was willing to give an interview to a few enthousiastic blenderheads. So we took a day off of school and went from Den Bosch to Amsterdam for a day to interview the head of the blender organisation. Roosendaal is an awesome guy. With an exclusive look inside the office, the computer farm and the place were all the animation and magic happens, it was pretty cool. We filmed the whole thing and put it on youtube (with English subs).
We cut a lot from the video, and if you want, you can read the full Dutch interview in the attachment, and the English translated one as well.
Good to see students making an interview like this. Is there really a need for Dutch Tutorials? I run a youtube channel about League of Legends in Dutch, but was thinking about a Dutch Multimedia channel including Blender videos. However still more of an idea, since I had doubts about dutch tutorials.
Great interview! I agree on most things, except that he said blender is not realy for 12 year olds. I am thirteen years old now and I started when I was 12, and I don’t have any problems understanding working with blender. I don’t think the problem is age, but the amount of time you put into it.
About dutch tutorials, I think that will sound a bit wierd, since all the tools have English names.
Sorry Ton, but blender is really for 12 and younger, and older!
I started using blender when I was a little over 11 (coming from Google Sketchup). so it is a fun learning experience for every age. although I didn’t really know how to completely use it properly until I was 12. but I did find that most kids my age who looked over my shoulder and asked what’s that, is it free did not have a lasting learning experience. one of the kids didn’t want an introduction that took over 4 minutes and only asked me how to use background images (only knew it existed because he saw the McLaren F1 modeling sheet I was using), thinking it was the only advanced feature that would be hard to figure out. he tried placing a few primitives in the scene, played around with the NURBS surfaces, and I never heard from him again. another experience I found in teaching a school friend how to use blender in a team project (that barely ever got started) was him moving the 3D cursor all over the screen, playing with the grease pencil, me showing him how to use the modeling tools, him asking how to draw objects free hand. me explaining to him that putting two polygons on top of each other and glitching to be drawn first is not a valid way to achieve the effect seen in the peach-browser painting in Supermario 64. finally when he just figured out how to navigate the 3D view he asked me If he could graduate to 3DSMax, with me paying for it (because he heard some guy that uses 3DSMax in a chat box on an online multiplayer game). so I see your point that a lot of 12 year olds don’t have the patience to use blender, but if they put their mind to it anyone can learn it (just don’t expect me to be teaching one of them anytime soon.)
A while ago I randomly bumped into a series of tutorials by a really young fellow. Blender could be teached at schools.
http://www.youtube.com/user/FlyFabian/videos
From what I know, Blender was not used as a pre-vis tool on Spiderman 2.
What is he talking about, I was making pretty decent renders at the age of 12 when I found blender
Video is no longer available (private)
I don’t know why but I found this interview on the edge to be pathetic.
But probably it must be contextualized since probably Ton is talking to kids who believe in fairies and justin bieber.
It depends on what expectations the beholder has before watching it.
And now the video is gone…