Hacker Cinema
Sintel
2010 · Film · short · 14 min
Directed by Colin Levy
A wandering warrior finds an unlikely friend in the form of a young dragon. The two develop a close bond, until one day the dragon is snatched away. She then sets out on a relentless quest to reclaim her friend, finding in the end that her quest exacts a far greater price than she had ever imagined.
5 positive6 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
"Tears of Steel" was the fourth Blender Open Movie project. The first one was 2006's "Elephants Dream", then "Big Buck Bunny" and "Sintel".
From the more recent ones I highly recommend "Sprite Fright".
Sintel is worth watching. I believe it's also the longest one at about 15 minutes.
Nice to see G'MIC's smart colorize algorithm making its way into core GIMP. The research team worked with David Revoy, the character designer of several Blender open movies (such as Sintel or Spring), so I've heard a lot about it from him. He's written a few blog posts (e.g. [1]) and videos on how to use the Krita and GIMP implementations of the feature.
[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article324/smart-coloring-preview-of-a-new-gmic-filter
One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" side of open source software.
That doesn't mean Blender users need to do that to be productive, but it definitely gives actual users a stronger voice. I find free software generally doesn't work as well when there's a hard split between the developers and the users, unless those developers are incredibly empathetic, clever, and well funded. (Or just fully aware of the problem they're solving, but it's hard to find a large sample of people that can write a really good vector graphic editor, have a clue about UI design, and are also keenly aware of the problems people deal with when they're drawing a graphic novel).
You can see that process working well with Blender's open movie projects (https://www.blender.org/about/projects/). I haven't paid attention to them recently, but in the past they have been structured around building some new feature in Blender, such as improving the video editor and motion tracking experience (Tears of Steel), or rendering and sculpting (Sintel).
David Revoy is an extremely talented illustrator and a long time supporter of free & open source tools. He released "Chaos & Evolutions"[1] a few years ago where he shows his workflows in gimp, alchemy and mypaint, he was involved with the making of the movie "Sintel", another open source project made in Blender[2] and his blog is filled with tutorials for the Krita software (photoshop alternative for ilustrations). You can find a lot of his wonderful works on deviantart, but my favorite by far (and I urge everyone to take a look) is the graphic novel "L'heritage en couleur" [3].
[1] http://www.davidrevoy.com/article44/artworks-from-my-dvd-chaos-evolutions
[2] https://durian.blender.org/
[3] http://deevad.deviantart.com/art/l-heritage-en-couleur-308125572
There is some discussion about the importance of story on the latest edition of Blender Guru.
http://www.blenderguru.com/podcast-beorn-leonard-working-on-sintel-and-the-lego-movie/
It's a good interview with Beorn Leonard, one of the animators on Sintel, and most recently the Lego movie.
And they kind of need to be reminded what Linux is..
If people start clamoring Linus to descend from heavens and bring us video editing, it's just a silly as what grandparent referred to.
I see this might be viewed as pedantic, but Linux is not a distro you used.
Additionally Linux does have Blender with support for video editing, which from what I've heard was used to make Sintel and other movies.
For reference. Other open movies made by the Blender Foundation are Big Bucks Bunny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7VzlLtp-4
And Sintel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ
That was the main focus of Sintel. There was a lot of focus on getting the renderer able to realistically handle 4k, which is a resolution standard (stands for 4k horizontal resolution). From wikipedia
As of 2009, the most common acquisition medium for digitally projected features is 35 mm film scanned and processed at 2K (2048×1556) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution via digital intermediate. Most digital features to date have been shot at 1920×1080 HD resolution using cameras such as the Sony CineAlta, Panavision Genesis or Thomson Viper. New cameras such as the Arri Alexa can capture 2K resolution images, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One can record 4K, and Sony's F65 CineAlta camera can capture 4K and beyond to 8K 8768 x 2324.
So it is actually twice the resolution you would expect to see in theaters.
P.S. Don't show your daughter Sintel until you've watched it, it's actually fairly sad.
I'm watching Sintel now at 1080p. The quality is something I'd expect to see in a movie theater! Previously I've seen Big Buck Bunny, which my daughter loves. :) But Sintel blows it away.
Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount.
Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.
The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/
The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse.
http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/ http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ http://www.blendernation.com/ (and many more, in other languages)
But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.
The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files from the film were too, so the community could benefit.
Where did the money come from? Presales of the DVD, which contained all the special features and files, and was released before the movie was posted to youtube, giving a "sneak preview". One project serving as fundraising, community support, community outreach, tutorial/teaching, feature development, focus grouping, beta testing/dogfooding, and publicity. Success.
Here are links to some of the other blender open projects.
- http://www.sintel.org/ - Project Durian - Sintel, focus on special effects, high res cinimatic rendering, and animation improvements. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ
- http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/index.php - Project Mango - Big Buck Bunny - focus on hair/fiber, work with outdoor/large scenes, improve animation system for cartoony deformation styled animations. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSGBVzeBUbk)
(Note: Chances are you've seen this somewhere, because of the CC licence, stores and online video hosts love to use it for a placeholder)
- http://orange.blender.org/ - Project Orange - Elephants Dream - This is the project which developed blender into a program that had all the features to compete with the big boys, added the node compositing and spleen animation controls, plus lots more. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFtg0WBD5Hc&feature=fvst)
I would advise watching all of those, besides being great artistically, the stories are actually pretty good.
I think Blender really is different from other graphics free-software: - It is baked by a very strong foundation. - It is used by real studios all over the world (and more and more used) - It is used by the scientific world a lot. - The new release cycle is around 10 weeks. And every release ships with awesome features. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Process/Release_Cycle - the community is strong, big and active. - it supports a lot of OS, and the experience is great in all of them. - The foundation is very user focused : * they create "open movies" to identify the needs and the weakness of the use of Blender is pro environement. You don't know about Big Buck Bunny (http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/) or Sintel (http://www.sintel.org/) ? * they try to focus on real problems, not on eye-candy or extra-features that would impress but not be useful once.