The Amsterdam based ‘Blender Institute’ announced today the premiere of the short 3D animation movie 'Big Buck Bunny'. After a production period of over six months, the short film will premiere with a grand party on Thursday 10th of April, in the hip new Amsterdam cinema ‘Studio K’.
“The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software” said producer and Institute director Ton Roosendaal, “But the result equals on artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity the quality of what you would expect from large animation studios”.
The movie differentiates itself mostly by its totally open character. Not only open source tools such as the 3D suite ‘Blender’ were used to create the movie, but also the movie itself - including all materials as used in the animation studio - will be freely accessible for everybody to reuse, to learn from it or just to enjoy it.
The promotion of Open Content creation and distribution is one of the main goals of the Creative Commons, the organization that created the 'Creative Commons' licenses, which have been widely adopted by artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who wish to freely share their creative endeavors.
Blender Institute in Amsterdam is one of the first companies worldwide exploiting Open Content professionally and commercially. Currently 14 people are working full-time in the Institute, wrapping up Big Buck Bunny and working on an Open Game based on the characters from the movie.
Big Buck Bunny is a comedy about a well-tempered rabbit “Big Buck”, who finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three rodents. In the typical 1950ies cartoon tradition Big Buck then prepares for the rodents a comical revenge.
The creative team for the movie were brought together by the Blender Institute from all over the world, including the USA, Denmark, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia. The music has been composed by Jan Morgenstern, who also provided the sound track for the previous Blender production; “Elephant's Dream”.
Big Buck Bunny will be released on 35mm film format, on DVD and Blu-ray. The latter will be available by the end of April. Shortly after the DVD release the film will be freely downloadable for everyone in various formats.
“The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software” said producer and Institute director Ton Roosendaal, “But the result equals on artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity the quality of what you would expect from large animation studios”.
The movie differentiates itself mostly by its totally open character. Not only open source tools such as the 3D suite ‘Blender’ were used to create the movie, but also the movie itself - including all materials as used in the animation studio - will be freely accessible for everybody to reuse, to learn from it or just to enjoy it.
The promotion of Open Content creation and distribution is one of the main goals of the Creative Commons, the organization that created the 'Creative Commons' licenses, which have been widely adopted by artists, musicians, and other creative individuals who wish to freely share their creative endeavors.
Blender Institute in Amsterdam is one of the first companies worldwide exploiting Open Content professionally and commercially. Currently 14 people are working full-time in the Institute, wrapping up Big Buck Bunny and working on an Open Game based on the characters from the movie.
Big Buck Bunny is a comedy about a well-tempered rabbit “Big Buck”, who finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three rodents. In the typical 1950ies cartoon tradition Big Buck then prepares for the rodents a comical revenge.The creative team for the movie were brought together by the Blender Institute from all over the world, including the USA, Denmark, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia. The music has been composed by Jan Morgenstern, who also provided the sound track for the previous Blender production; “Elephant's Dream”.
Big Buck Bunny will be released on 35mm film format, on DVD and Blu-ray. The latter will be available by the end of April. Shortly after the DVD release the film will be freely downloadable for everyone in various formats.
“The Big Buck Bunny movie project demonstrates that the barriers to entry in the 3D animation world can be lowered tremendously using on-demand computing platforms. Even though the Blender team did not have support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform,” said David Folk, Group Manager of Network.com Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. “With a growing collection of applications, a host of new developer tools and worldwide availability, Network.com is attracting more developers and end-users to use, build and share new services for a wide range of industries.”
The movie promotes open content creation as it is not only developed using open source software but also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. “The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open
source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you would expect from large animation studios,” said Ton Roosendaal, producer and Blender Institute director. “We needed over fifty thousand CPU-hours of compute time, and Sun's Network.com grid service provided us a very powerful platform where we could use hundreds of CPUs simultaneously to significantly speed up the movie rendering process without needing to own the compute infrastructure.”
The movie promotes open content creation as it is not only developed using open source software but also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. “The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open
Project team:
Script and direction by: Sacha Goedegebure (Netherlands)
Art direction: Andreas Goralczyk (Germany)
Lead Artist: Enrico Valenza (Italy),
Animation: Nathan Vegdahl (USA), William Reynish (Denmark)
Technical directors: Brecht van Lommel (Belgium) en Campbell Barton (Australia)
Music by: Jan Morgenstern (Germany)
Produced by: Ton Roosendaal (Netherlands)
About “Big Buck Bunny”
Blender Institute: http://blenderinstitute.nl
Blender: http://blender.org
Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org
Big Buck Bunny is a comedy about a well-tempered rabbit “Big Buck,” who finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three rodents. In the typical 1950s cartoon tradition, Big Buck then prepares for the rodents in a comical revenge. The creative team for the movie was brought together by the Blender Institute from all over the world, including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and USA. In addition to the online release, Big Buck Bunny has been released in 35mm film format on DVD and Blu-ray. For more information, please visit http://bigbuckbunny.org
About Network.com
Sun's Network.com provides access to compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis via its Sun Grid compute utility at $1/CPU-hr. It is powered by the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun(TM) Grid Engine running on Sun's x64 hardware. CPU-hr is defined as the aggregate time spent across all CPUs and rounded up to the next hour. For more information, please visit http://www.network.com.
Sun's Network.com provides access to compute infrastructure on a pay-per-use basis via its Sun Grid compute utility at $1/CPU-hr. It is powered by the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun(TM) Grid Engine running on Sun's x64 hardware. CPU-hr is defined as the aggregate time spent across all CPUs and rounded up to the next hour. For more information, please visit http://www.network.com.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is The Computer"(TM) -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in Sun Microsystems, Inc. more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.
Blender: http://blender.org
Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org
Posts
Perfect animation.
RR