We wouldn’t deserve the a score and soundtrack from Jan Morgenstern if we didn’t have at least the 35mm film provided with official Dolby Digital (5.1) sound! Although this isn’t really an “open standard”, it at least does have an obvious quality benefit… not to forget that the only (free) alternative would be simply analog stereo (or in Jan’s words: “it will sound like a crappy 70ies or 80ies movie then”).

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The Peach Team just had a too-long meeting where we reviewed our final edit of the movie. And guess what? It’s done!

Well… basically. We still need to do the credits, and a few final renders are still processing. But “Big Buck Bunny” is essentially done.

Yayz!

Now it’s time to move on to the DVD work. We have an ambitious set of extras planned. At least, they seem ambitious from this side of the fence. But I want to be all mysterious and whatnot, so I’m not going to tell you what they are. Bwa ha ha. But I think everyone will be pleased.

Wish us luck!

Wahoo! The neighbours from Filmmore provided us a test print with 1 minute of material for color tests. It was already totally exciting to hold the metal case in my own hands… for me the first film ever, a wonderful experience. :)

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To download the trailer in HD and other resolutions or find several mirrors, click here

HD streaming version

Recently I realized that we never really made a complete Blender Institute tour after this project started. Sure, there was Ton’s first round trip waaaay back, but we needed something new, shiny and classy like this to show you how great this place actually is! Luckily Nathan, our master of rigging, animating and hugging, agreed to improvise a very sincere and pertinent guided VIP tour through the marvels of our beloved work- and living- space.

Welcome to the Blender Institute!

Ogg file

Finally an update from the producers department.
Let’s start with the biggest news: the premiere date now is final and confirmed!

• Thursday April 10th, 2008
• Cinema Studio K, Amsterdam the Netherlands
• Premiere event starts at 19.00, and includes dinner and party.

This is actually two weeks later than the original plan… which we’ll especially need to go over all shots again for final tweaks, error fixing, and general beautifying.

The premiere event has been made possible in collaboration with Creative Commons Netherlands (thanks guys!), which enables us to make this an unforgettable evening for Blender and for the open source and open content movement again.

The other big news is that we’ll have a real 35mm film copy with digital sound this time! Thanks to sponsorship of our friendly neighbours of Filmmore we will even get three copies, sufficient for an efficient distribution to festivals worldwide. It also means that we can start finding cinemas in big cities for local premiere events (between april 15 and june 1). If you’re interested in organizing this, please email margreet(at)blender.org to get more information.

The premiere evening will be accessible for everyone. However, if you want to be assured you can get a seat for the first screening you have to subscribe to the VIP ticket in our e-shop. This ticket only costs 30 euro and includes a glass of champagne after the film, snacks and a meal, some free drinks and first access to the party with a cool DJ. Not to mention early access to all celebs!

The cinema also will do a second screening, probably around 20h. This will be freely accessible for everyone, on a ‘first come first gets in’ basis. The party is also accessible for everyone, but only after 22h. You’ll then have to take care of your own dinner and pay for own drinks. But you’re very welcome!
More details about the schedule we’ll post here soon.

Note: Studio K is a hip new venue, in the same block as the recently opened StayOK hostel. This hostel has an excellent name. Book early!

Visit the e-shop to reserve your VIP ticket.

Later more,

-Ton-

50 shots to go, don’t panic.

As the final deadline is getting closer and closer (more exciting, riveting, mind-warping news about that soon!) everything seems to be moving at light speed. almost the entire movie is animated and ready for further reviews and improvements, the environments are completed, final scenes set up, lit and composited to shape what’s going to be the first Open Movie of the Blender Institute: Big Buck Bunny!

*ehem* now that the PR-talk part of my brain is satisfied…

An essential part of the “finals”-process is the blender node compositor (aka. “noodle” - editing). A couple of weeks ago Nathan kissed the animation team goodbye and was transformed into a node-wrangler wizard. He is currently helping me to take the files from the animation- and environment department apart and assemble them back in compositing.

There are multiple reasons for utilizing a compositing pipeline that is integrated tightly into the rendering process:

1. many scenes are way to complex to be rendered in one single pass (trees, leaves, bushes, grass, fur, feathers, huge textures, matte paintings)
2. a rather annoying limitation of blender is that it does not handle motion blur and depth of field inside the rendering process very well, they have to be done in post. luckily blender has one of the most powerful 2D vector motion blur effects available, now with a new option to make curved motion blur (arcs are an essential tool in character animation)
3. characters and scene elements often require individual color and effect treatments that go beyond lighting and exposure adjustments. after all, this is a cartoon!
4. the anti-aliasing process is done after post-processing on ALL the rendering samples for extra crisp image quality (the new FSA option), also useful in masking and layer-seperation.

Here is a small step-by-step insight into this process:

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For two days we have Roemer around. For school he has to do a practical assignment to focus on the future and get more information about which direction he wants to go to. And luckily he choose Blender :) He interviewed Sacha about the externals helping out the Peach team to get to movie finished on time.

Download the .ogg file here.

One of my tasks here is to make sure the Big Buck Bunny gets rendered, even though Im not crazy about networks, ssh connections and figuring out why the Nth frame didn’t render, some of you have shown interest in the renderfarm so heres a rundown of how it works ;)

Images are rendered on Sun’s Grid at http://network.com, they have a service where you can buy time on their systems for $1 per CPU-Hour, Many tasks can be uploaded to run parallel on their systems, I think they have 600 CPU’s but we’ve only ever managed to hog around 240, with an average of 150 CPU’s at a time.

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I’ve put together a little video that describes the various stages of animation I go through. These aren’t hard-and-set rules, but more like guidelines that help me animate more efficiently. Depending on the shot I’ll be more or less rigid about keeping the stages separate.

I also left out an important stage in the video, which is sketching out ideas for the shot. I left it out because the drawings — if you can call them that — are really embarrassing. But for me it’s a really important stage because it’s easier for me to explore ideas through rough sketches than through painstakingly posing a model in 3D. (If anyone is curious, I often use Pencil for some of that drawing/exploration stage. Pencil is nice because it’s a 2D animation software, so I can actually do rough 2D animation to test out ideas.)

.ogg video file