Newspaper clippings
Posted in Blender Institute, Production by Ton
Here’s the first major newspaper article about the premiere. It’s the #1 newspaper here in Amsterdam, with mostly Amsterdam related topics. You can find most of this also on their website here:
“Big Buck schudt filmwereld op”
(“Big Buck shakes the movie world”)
The images:
First clipping is from page 8, right-bottom corner.
Second clipping is in the weekend supplement.
Note that they consider the “gratis” aspect most interesting! But, the “free software” concept is pretty well covered in the text.
Other news: currently the dvds are being authored… end of april it should be at the printer’s still. Expected release is May 15. But… you know how it goes when you announce dates! Let’s try at least. ;)
-Ton-
April 19th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
what are you guys using to author the dvd? I remember that during ED you got some problems to author with OSS.
April 19th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Hooray! This is really neat. Some friends and I want to make some short animations, but it will be a long time yet till we even get started.
I look forward to the ownload, since I can’t afford the DVD. i would if I could – this a really great project. I support open-source software and products totally.
Keep up the good work,
Al
April 19th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Too bad I can’t read German!
April 19th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
That’s an excellent article indeed! They capture attention by mentioning “Gratis” (hey, we’re Dutch, right? :) ) and then elaborate on the open aspect (in such a way that they make the reader enthusiastic).
April 19th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
It’s actually dutch. I know German and I hardly understand what they write.
April 19th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
150 000 €!!! :o
April 19th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
What was the budget for Elephant Dream ?
April 19th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Haha, I’m glad Dutch is one of Belgium’s official languages which therefore I’ve learnt at school, so that I can understand what is said :D
@VoOdKa : According to Wikipedia, 120000€.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Wow, it’s surprising how close Afrikaans is to Dutch. I can understand most of it easily.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
I like being able to imagine Mario & Luigi over there trying to catch up!
April 20th, 2008 at 12:07 am
@Matt don’t worry. You don’t have to be able to read german to read dutch.
:]
/Nathan
April 20th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Hehe, deutsch zu können hilft aber mehr, um holländisch zu verstehen als Englisch oder Spanisch, gell?
It is more helpfull to understand german, in order to understand dutch as english, isn’t it?
April 20th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Great articles. Yeah it is very similar to afrikaans. Slight grammer difference though. I get the feeling the sentences are constructed differently.
April 20th, 2008 at 4:59 am
Google translate seems to have a problem with compound words.
I’m afraid I don’t know any Dutch and very little German. Can anyone provide a rough translation or synopsis in English please?
April 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yay, I am Dutch!
Funny to read that they talk a lot more about the ‘free’ aspect of the movie than the ‘hollywood’-quality of the movie.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Funny that the main discussion here is about the language, not the content of the story :-) It was dead fun writing it, pls consider that it’s targeted at a general audience with limited knowledge of ‘open source’.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
@Nathan
Funny thing is, that my native language is german and I can read most of it. It seems to be a strange mixture of german and english with only a few words I can’t figure out. ;)
April 21st, 2008 at 2:43 am
Can i download it from this site or should i start looking at bittorrent?
April 21st, 2008 at 6:44 am
I can read some dutch and got the gist of the article but can’t do it justice for you here. But for a laugh I took the website listed on the bottom of the second image (which is an online version of the article) and had babelfish translate it.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
@Gianmichele, William is doing the dvd authoring, but is keeping a low profile so as not to get in trouble with the opensource zealots. :)
All the DVD we sent off for film festavels etc were made in Linux.
– This website has excellent tut of how to do it, looks a bit tricky but is actually a no brainer.
http://www.linux.com/articles/53702
The latest dvd-styler compiled on ubuntu, looks like it supports everything we need, worth trying.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
“You saw it!” Ton Roosendaal hits the table with his hand. “It’s so difficult to make grass move naturally”. At the beginning of Big Buck Bunny, the animation produced and facilitated by Roosendaal’s Blender institute, main actor Buck is skipping cheerfully through meadows of rigid grass. At the end of the movie the grass blades move towards him. “During the production of the movie we got a better control over the grass”, says Roosendaal. “The leaves on the trees worked fine from the very start”.
Big Buck Bunny is a special film. Special because the animation has been completely produced on the Entrepotdok in Amsterdam. By seven people. In seven months. With free software, which anyone can download. The movie will be freely available as well on the internet, including all the files used to produce it. Anyone can take them and do with them what they want.
Such computer-animation movies can only exist by the grace of the software. If nobody provided the means to create natural phenomena such as moving grass of leaves, then the film will look terribly unnatural.
Especially if the software can’t handle hairs. “Our software had no fur capabilities”, says Roosendaal. “Creating fur with a computer is difficult, but making sure that all hairs move naturally and stay in place with the character moving in front of the ‘camera’ even more so”.
Animation pioneer Pixer spent many years and millions of dollars on it for Monsters Inc. Blender does not have that amount of time, nor a similar financial budget. Still all the millions of virtual hairs of Buck and is rivals Gimera, Frank and Rinky, as well as the feathers of Bird who has a minor disorganizing role, are swaying towards you. “That was one of the demands we made to our creators: a film with fur and humor. That was basically all we demanded”.
Big Buck Bunny is not just a technical exercise. The film can stand up to high-budget Hollywood productions such as Pixar’s Nemo or Ratatouille, Dreamworks’ Shrek or Fox’s Ice Age. Not just in terms of visual quality, but also in terms of the script.
The story is a mix between animal animation movies such as Over the hedge and A bug’s life and has a twist ending like Revenge of the nerds. All of this without any Disney-like moralism. Rabit Buck and the rest of the movie-fauna are being harassed by three evil creatures who don’t shy away from a biblical stoning. The big boned bunny gets his revenge however in a Predator-like finaly.
The whole story has been written by dutch director and script-writer Sacha Goedegebure – an art teacher and cartoonist in daily life – who had to learn how to write a script in one week from a Disney veteran who offered his services. The team of seven movie creators, who did not know each other beforehand, come from equally as many countries and worked on the film for months, earning nothing more than living arangements, the ticket and basic expenses. The score which perfectly integrates into the movie has been written by a German composer of music for commercials.
Big Buck Bunny costed 150,000 euros. That basically equates to 7 seconds of Ratatouille. 800 users of Blender payed, before even a single frame had been completed, 30 euros for a collectors-dvd as well as the right to be mentioned on the movies credits. Sun Microsystems offered valuable time on their super computers. Roughly 40,000 hours. Filmmore, the neighbors of the Blender institute, put the final result on a 35mm film for free.
This week the celluloid version went into premiere in Studio K. In may the film will be released in hdtv quality on a double DVD with bonus materials, and will be released and the internet as well. For just a few hundreds of euros the original files totalling 260GB can be bought as well by those who like to do so.
After this the film can be freely downloaded and modified, as long as the original creators get their credits. “Heineken can make a beer commercial out of it if they would want to”, says Roosendaal. “I would even applaud that. I would like to challenge companies like Nike to create open commercials, so they will see the advantages of shared content, unlimited releases and the freedom to build on top of it. It’s all about the message”.
At the moment a game version of the movie is being created at the Entrepotdok. A full fledged game with the characters and decors of Big Buck Bunny. The game will be freely available as well, most likely within half a year.
There are even several other projects on the digital drawing board. There will be a new ‘Beowulf-like teen-movie’ with ‘monsters, wizzards and lots of ninjas’, for which the Blender software will need to be modified to include skins, scales and sword-fights.
Roosendaal is very enthousiastic about a special effects movie. “With blender it is possible to create special effects for movies. Such as a metal spider devowering Amsterdam. That is to say, it could be developed inside blender. We can’t do explosions at the moment, but I think it would be awsome to have the capability”
The goal is to make animation software freely available to anyone. “We want to have the technology of Hollywood available for everyone. In the US a couple of high-school students used Blender to create a 30 minutes science fiction movie. They are the Spielbergs of the future”.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:31 pm
i can’t read it!
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Ton:[quote]a beowulflike puberty movie with monsters, wizards and a lot of ninja’s[/quote]
Is that project durian? It sounds awesome!!
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:53 am
For those of you who, like me, speak only english, here’s a translated version for you:
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7440/bigbuckmn5.jpg
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:53 am
For those of you who, like me, speak only english, here’s a translated version for you:
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/7440/bigbuckmn5.jpg
Oops! Just realized I have a spelling mistake in the first line! Oh well, sorry Ton.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:25 am
Fixed a few mistakes: have another image:
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/5653/bigbuckxi5.jpg
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:26 am
Great all that publicity!!! I just watched De Wereld Draaid door on http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl perfect nice interview. They where talking about Pixar what’s that?? We have Animationwood aan het IJ.
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Does anyone know any more details about the science fiction movie made by high school students?
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Jogai: yep, that’s the idea of Durian. Everything you always wanted to do once packed in an epic short clip!
SummerRider: I referenced to “Spaceman Belong in the Future, Probably”. http://www.spacemenmovie.com/
Awesome work from Ian Hubert and his team.
May 6th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
It has been reported by media about criminal who has been …
stalking women and children by using GPS/Car Navigator. Where I can find some more information? M-CHIP device can jam GPS used by criminals, details No.4 at http://www.motionmetrics.org
Dr. Edward Romanoff
Preventive Science Institute (PSI)
[email protected]
May 13th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Holy cow. I want to be involved in Durian somehow! It sounds like the coolest project I’ve ever heard of. In my life.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:08 am
Big Buck Bunny is a special film. Special because the animation has been completely produced on the Entrepotdok in Amsterdam. By seven people. In seven months. With free software, which anyone can download. The movie will be freely available as well on the internet, including all the files used to produce it. Anyone can take them and do with them what they want.