Blender's "Project Orange": The First <i>Open Movie</i>

There's something brewing in the Netherlands, the likes of which have never been seen before. It is an undertaking that is sure to bring the spotlight on the world of open-source. This something will be the very first open movie: Project Orange. The goal is a 12 to 20 minute 3D animated movie-short, made entirely with open-source software. The software list includes: Gimp, YafRay, Verse, CinePaint, and Python, but the program at the heart of this project is none other than Blender.

Blender's Interface Blender is a cross-platform 3D creation suite a powerful program, comprising of; modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, and even game creation, in a surprisingly small downloadable package. Throughout this article, Ton Roosendaal, Blender's creator, and chairman of the Blender Foundation, shares a bit about the project, where it's at, and how it all got started. Ton Roosendaal: "I've been thinking a lot about the organization/business model of an open source Foundation. Somehow I prefer to not create a huge organization with employees, but instead keep the Foundation non-profit, idealistic and minimal in size, and facilitate as many third parties as possible to conduct business with Blender. The downside of that approach is that you'll really miss the day-to-day interaction of developers and artists, especially to validate Blender as a quality product to deploy in professional environments." "Last year I visited a presentation in Amsterdam, at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, and was very interested in their approach to organize temporal projects for artists. They have studios, arrange the housing, and establish a technical staff for the artists. Something like that could work for open source projects (especially projects like Blender) very well. That's how it all started." The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo, will jointly fund the project. The BF is bringing up the majority of their end through the pre-sale of a special edition DVD of the movie. The best part about the DVD is the awesome extras. As well as a "making of" documentary, through a Creative Commons license, all production files (blend files, models, and textures) and through a GPL, the software used will also be included! "Since all financing will be done by the Art Institute, Dutch funds, and our community, we were free to make all the production files available in an open and free license as well. Something some artists in the team might find scary in the beginning, but which will become a very interesting database and resource for anyone interested in creating larger scale animation productions."

Core Team With a core team of six already established, the project will officially begin the first week of September, when definite storyboards will be created. Onsite developers at Montevideo, as well as possible contributions online from the Blender community will assist the team. The project will be a full 6-month duration, ending in March of 2006. The movie will then be available as a download from the Blender website, as well as the aforementioned DVD. It will also be transferred to 35mm film for distribution to theaters and festivals. The goal is in sight, all is falling into place, and Ton seems very confident. "The two main sponsoring targets (for music/audio and renderfarm) have been found already. We're still in discussions with a third party to sponsor our workstations. The public support campaign (by presale of the DVD movie) has started, and goes excellent as well. In the first week almost 300 copies were sold already. The target is 1000 minimum, but hopefully we can do a little more." The project will also prove to be a big help in the development of the Blender program itself. In more than 10 years since it's first transition from an in-house tool for a Dutch animation studio, Blender has continually taken big leaps forward. This is mainly due to the support, dedication, and interaction of its users sharing in the development process. Now with this project at hand, comes another leap for Blender. "Best of all, is that by starting this project, the development of Blender itself also gets a big boost. The entire (character) animation system is being rebuilt from scratch now. For the next months the render system will be extended to render and save in passes (diffuse, specular, AO, shadow, etc) with an excellent built-in compositor to edit this, all based on high definition color of course." It is unclear right now as to how much of the project will be made public during the creation process. There is always the possibility that too much outside influence could be a hindrance to the end result. Though a teaser could appear at the Blender Conference in October, any hint of the concept of the project is, at this time, just beyond reach. "At this moment we still work with the scenario writer on finalizing the concept and script. I prefer to keep that vulnerable process private still, until we all feel confident about it. Most conceptual design and decisions will be done in the first weeks when we're together, rather than doing it right now already. That way everyone in the team can contribute, and make it really becoming 'their own' project. And, if there's news, we of course will post that on www.orange.blender.org first." Keep checking the Renderosity Front Page News for Blenders Orange Project updates, and of course dont miss the projects movie completion in March 2006.