Gooseberry Weekly #44: June 19, 2015
Join the Gooseberry team for their latest project update!
Elysia Brenner writes:
Here are your highlights for the penultimate weekly livecast of the Project Gooseberry Cosmos Laundromat pilot production. The animations and sims are almost finalized and the final renders are in the making. Plus, there’s a new and improved edit of the film with early sound editing and lots and lots of renders added. Check it all out below and on the Cloud!
Would it kill if they just create a cheerful type of the story instead of showing a sheep that want to commit suicide and a smoker who doesn’t show a good example and then push it on home media or even movie theaters? This way they could bring more people to watch the movie and make much more money that just on their cloud thing(that is realistically full with people that don’t really care for this animation but the features developed in the meantime).
I would argue its a waste for an independent production to do the same kind of film that large studios make. As an independent you have an opportunity to contribute something different to our culture, rather than the same old ‘safe’ stuff that all the studios so dearly love. Sure, its risky, and some people will inevitably hate what you make, but with a bit of luck others will love it, sometimes for nothing more than standing up and daring to be different.
Besides, this is the start of a feature film – by starting in such a dark place the feel good factor when you end somewhere bright will only be enhanced. Assuming they do that of course – that is for the screenwriter/director to decide (with the producers interference of course;-) ).
Start of a feature film?
By the time this short is hatched, I hope everybody agrees to move on,
and contribute something beyond Tears of Steel:
that one, IMO, was a big step in the right direction.
Look at Victoria 7, heaving herself out of the Uncanny Valley!
Create something not family safe and noone would care if it ends up on a high positive note. How much time was wasted on a short not even full movie but a short? And the reason why it happened this way is because BF decided to create something for small circle of people and promote Blender development at the same time as making money. It doesn’t work like this in a real world. BF gathered many studios at a time and together they could deliver and promote just an animation, fff(funny & family friendly) and push it to the outer world. And no you don’t need to have Pixar level graphics quality for kids to enjoy, Despicable Me(that is also much different from Disney works)? Illumination Entertainment had ~30 people to create it, 30 Carl! BF and those studios could gain enormous by BF’s standarts money and right now at this point they could’ve push Blender much further. Everyone could’ve won. And then after it they could produce anything they wanted to.
the best movie blender foundation did to date is “elephants dream”. and do you know why? because at that time they did not try to please the mainstream audience with shallow stories about funny, furry and so cute animals.
making money is not the aim of open source software. blender foundation does a good thing in developing their underground stories because artists pay attention to special stuff over mainstream.
Yes, money aren’t important thats why no OSS starts any kickstarter like campaigns to gather them or cloud services. Money may not be the end goal but they’re necessity to get to the goal and everyone understand this.
Bad business decisions is why Blender will be nothing more than a dated software soon enough if BF won’t change their minds. Right now every program starts to become like Blender(everything in one package) including sculpting software that has hard surface modeling tools and texture painting, next step is animation for them. Blender is the last to adopt OSS technologies and has many things to rewrite(said by devs themselves) and to support new an useful tools(said by devs themselves). To change this they need more developers, not addon devs that only write python scripts(we don’t want to see Blender even slower than it is) but real developers. And to do it, yes we need money and thats exactly the reason behind shorts, clouds and lessons.
P.S. We could already use voxel sculpting inside Blender if BF would have enough money at a time to hire just one man who was quickly hired by company that sell voxel sculpting feature.
could you please tell me any 3d software that develops faster than blender? is there any graphic oss program more developed than blender?
apart from that blender never started to
a) replace or compete with commercial software or
b) to be commercially successful.
the idea of a race comes mainly from fan boys that want to “follow” a software project that one day beats the big, money powered players.
as you mention ‘dated software’: most 3d programs that are 20 years or older share the problem of containing outdated parts. cinema, houdini, maya, max feel like dinosaurs at places, too. by the way i think all of them started to support python so users can develop plug-ins and if stuff gets attention by their users, developers adopt it.
i see blender as an extremely successful project and cant see that speed (or as you say money) is or ever has been a problem.
“…programs that are 20 years or older share the problem of containing outdated parts….feel like dinosaurs at places, too”
But you missed out Adobe! Have you ever tried Illustrator’s Arc ‘tool’? By my own experience, better arc drawing tools existed in other drawing programs more than 20 years ago! :-)
i am not much of an illustrator user and would not consider adobe as a 3d package either but you are right: most big programs suffer from outdated program parts. same with cities, states and companies once they reached a certain size.
So you missed the main part about more money=better development yet you’re trying to start Blender vs Maya etc topic? Not going to happen. Please tell me why more moneygood for development and why do you think they couldn’t create more deep animation after creation of something more fun(fun doesn’t translate as bad, just so you know) that could help them earn money?
you are probably confusing something: you suggested commercial ideas to OSS developers, not me.
blender is developing fast enough without much money. the mindless feature hunt proposed by baby users is also unnecessary in my opinion.
and why exactly do you think a funny movie would bring in any money? BF does not seem to sell gooseberry to anyone. i haven´t heard of merchandising either. blender movies are not and try not to be pixar.
if you think money is such a blessing, please talk to the softimage user base. they will tell you about the negative sides of optimizing profits at any costs. and you may also ask them whether they wish their software was open source or not.
apart from that animating a funny movie is not “deeper” or more complicated than creating a mature movie. blender will develop further any way. if you believe in money so much please purchase max, maya, modo, lightwave, cinema 4d and so on. you might even get their developers to program features on request if you pay them for it.
I already showed an example of small studio making alot of money while having less numbers of artists than BF could’ve gathered if first Goosberry campaign wouldn’t fail.
Don’t be such a child, everything costs money even OSS developing. And the bigger and more complex the project is the more programmers it needs, programmers that aren’t doing it for hobby want to eat and feed their family, and living in this world isn’t free. Yes, Goosberry started as attempt to get much more money than BF usually could get. It was clear as night and day to anyone who saw the campaign, well, for most people anyway.
And yes i believe if they would do family friendly animation and try to sell it(same campaign even) and not Blender features they would get more positive views from regular people(aka majority) and thus fuel Blender development much better. This could ensure not just new features that you apparently don’t even need(because you’re just a modeler, wild guess) but also cleaning up the mess of old features(Blender consist of features) multi-threading some operations(there was some guy who simply added OpenMP support to some modifiers and gain much more speed, imagine true multi threading aka without cons OpenMP brings), better viewport performance etc, but you don’t need it, right?
Also what has Softimage or Autodesk business model have to do with anything i wrote? O_o
My kids loved Sintel, but I’m not sure Gooseberry will do much for them. If Blender Foundation wants to raise its profile, it has to do something different. That means don’t do bug-eyed cartoon characters, and don’t do sci-fi spaceships / big guns / apocalyptic worlds – those ideas have all been worn out already! My preference would be thought-provoking 15 minute art films using a very attractive photorealistic human character couple (voiced by pro actors) set in a clean and positive futuristic architectural-visualised settings. Many of the artworks shown here on BlenderNation prove that both humans and arch-vis can be done brilliantly using Cycles, so let’s use that! In each episode the couple could do any combination of funny / serious / adventurous things, leaving the concept open for all sorts of plotlines suitable for adults and children. And even more important – the Blender community might be able to get involved by modelling assets for the environment, rather than being locked out.
Positive futuristic arch-vis, with realistic people in it: YESS!!
Need inspiration?
Vincent Callebaut: http://vincent.callebaut.org/projets-groupe-tout.html
Call me old fashioned, or a prude or whatever you like: I’m sad to see swearing in this production. Tears of Steel? Sure, it fits the theme, it’s a wartime film with a lot of ‘High risk’ and high tension moments. The swearing here isn’t during a high-tension “Oh $h!t’!!!” moment, it’s just there for shock factor, to express frustration. Even saying “damn hooves” would have been much more OK in my book, but “fing hooves” ? Really? I’m sorry, just my thoughts.
…attractive photorealistic humans…
…clean and positive futuristic archviz … different…
That kind of mood and setting calls for something different from film!
Think webcomic, where each panel is a 3D scene that the viewer can plunge into.
Advantages:
• Watching a film is passive. Navigating a 3D scene is active,
and gives non-Blender viewers a first impression of using this software.
• By not having to animate extensively, more human resource
can be devoted to the details that a realistic view demands.
• It would compel the Blender Institute to develop standardized
human models, the lack of which I see as the main obstacle
to more widespread Blender adoption.
I would highly recommend that Ton Roosendaal et al.
got together with Thomas Larsson and Joel Palmius of MakeHuman,
for some serious brainstorming.