With the arrival of director Ian Hubert and concept artist David Revoy next week, the Blender Institute in Amsterdam will be hosting another “open movie”. The project aims at developing and testing free/open source software for realising the visual effects of a short scifi movie, which will be filmed in Amsterdam.
Since 2005, Blender Foundation has successfully organised projects to stimulate and focus open source software development for 3D animation film and games. Each time a technical target was connected with a challenging creative concept, to be realised by an international group of artists working in the Blender Institute in Amsterdam. The results – three short films and a game – were not only realised using open source tools but also entirely published as Creative Commons, allowing anyone to spread it and even remix or recreate the content from scratch.
The projects were mostly financed via crowd-funding in the Blender user community, and via sponsoring and donations to the Blender Foundation. The new short film – code named Mango – is a short story about a disastrous break-up that almost leads to the destruction of planet Earth. It will be filmed on several locations in Amsterdam. A team of six artists and three developers will be working for half a year on realising the visual effects for the film. As for previous short films, the online community will be able to assist on tasks as well. Premiere is being targeted at September 2012.
Experts from the film industry have expressed interest as well. Consultants from renowned studios such as Weta, Rhythm & Hues and from Amsterdam’s VFX studio Filmmore are available for planning and supervising the work. Director of Photography will be Joris Kerbosch – who did camera for both New Kids feature films. Filming will be using Red Epic cameras, provided and supported by Camalot AV Services.
The 3D tool Blender – open source since 2002 – has steadily been growing to become a popular and serious 3D package for artists. This is thanks to the very active participation of its online community; 3D artists, 3D developers, studios and universities all over the world. A recent development is that also renowned Hollywood studios are opening up parts of their technology. Blender will be the first program to bring together work from ILM (OpenEXR, Alembic), Sony Pictures Imageworks (OpenShading, OpenColor, OpenImageIO) and Disney (PTex).
People interested to help out funding the project can visit the Mango website for pre-ordering the dvd box set. All orders paid before the 16th of February get a mention in the film scroll!