The Noordbrabants Museum, one of the main modern art museums in southern Netherlands, opened recently an exhibit “Fantasy Factory”, where BBB has a permanent display. This morning, the Dutch national news paper Volkskrant posted a positive review on this exhibit, ending with some words about BBB. Freely translated:

“From paper cutting to fast 3D-film”

“Radically different than for example the model-handicraft from van Kaayk, is Big Buck Bunny from the Netherlands computer graphics teacher Sacha Goedegebure, a comedy about a fat rabbit taking revenge on three irritating rodents. The film – in the fastest imaginable 3D computer animation – almost seems like being produced by Blue Sky studios, the producer of Ice Age 1-2-3, so natural and precise as the rabbit hairs wave in the wind.
Gosh, that we can do this too, you then think a while. And understandable that the eyes of the kids hanging in the beanbags of the theatre are glued on this Dutch rabbit humour.”

Ain’t this a fun review! :) Kudos to all who made BBB of course, it’s certainly not just a Dutch film… but we knew that!

-Ton-

Here’s a list of events that will happen the next 2 months in the Netherlands around Blender and BBB. Most of this is a result of our successful BBB launch in the Netherlands, which resulted in a cumulation of invitations… I’ve stopped accepting any more now! :)

To start with the most prestigious one:

Netherlands Film Festival, official selection in main program

Utrecht, sept 24 – oct 3, 2008
http://www.filmfestival.nl

• Three theatre screenings of BBB
• Sept 30: nominations for awards announced (we can become nominated in short film category)
• Oct 1: BBB screening + speaking as part of the “Re-vision, the new media effect” program
• Private screenings in international program for distributors, TV stations and studios.
• Oct 3: The grand Gala evening. Well, I’ll be going there anyway for fun!

(more…)

Friday August 8th: Disney visit

Thanks to our good friend & animation consultant & trainer Arno Kroner we had a great afternoon at the Disney Animation studios; the original place were animation got about invented (well, perfected :)!
There was a screening arranged in the main viewing room, and quickly after 12 PM the room quickly filled with about 70-80 people. After showing BBB (people laughed!) we did a 40 minute making-of presentation, especially showing Blender animation & compositing and the cool fact a single .blend file could manage and collect all the data for an entire movie shot.
After the presentation we went for lunch and a tour around the premises. Unfortunately the studios were forbidden for us… would have loved to pick the brains of developers about Bolt’s forest rendering methods. But, I did see the office of John Lassiter!

(more…)

It’s SIGGRAPH week (10-15 august)!
We’ve managed to get BBB screenings + peach team presentations in the theatres of three exciting Hollywood studios:

• Disney Feature Animation (friday)
• Dreamworks Animation (tuesday)
• Rhythm & Hues studios (wednesday)

This on top of our schedule already:

• Sunday: Siggraph Sandbox demos, 6-8 PM
• Monday, three BOFs 2-6 PM
• Tuesday-Thursday: demos on HP booth
• Wednesday 8.30 PM: BBB screening and ‘making of’ Panel

Four of the Peach crew artists will help me out for these 7 days, so here’s you chance to meet with Sacha, Nathan, William and Andy. It’s going to be great! Expect lots of pictures and a report here in a week

-Ton-

(Late news: BBB is in official selection for the prestigious Netherlands Film Festival. Whee!)

Our good friend from Torino, Gianluca “Kino3d” Faletti, has sent us a 250 GB disk, which we’ve copied our Peach studio backup on. Browse everything online here:

http://blender-mirror.kino3d.org/peach/

Note that you can get here the original 4 x 16 bits OpenExr files too, straight from the renderfarm. Console-savy people will want to use wget -r (recursive) to get all of the exr in a directory.

Thanks Kino!

Today we received a copy of the CG Magazine -July 2008 #81- all the way from China. There is a review of BBB in it, as well as an interview with Ton. We can’t read it, but it must be quite impressive, because we got even two pages more than the article about Kung Fu Panda!

Download the article here.

Enrico, Andy and the technical team have been busy for a long time now to create the environment for Peach.

Here you can get an impression how it is going to look like.

It is getting somewhere, and of course it is not even finished yet!

.ogg file

Just writing to let you know the gents at LugRadio interviewed Sacha in the last episode; “Time Gentlemen Please” (Season 5, Episode 9)

LugRadio is a Linux and free software focused podcasts, where 4 guys from the UK discuss open-source, communities and various projects

For those who follow the blog closely the interview dosnt go into details but its still worth a listen.

Download the OGG or MP3 from www.lugradio.org

During the last week Nathan had a friend over; Aaron. Aaron just left today with a signed t-shirt from the whole Peach team. Be aware this is a collectors item. The one and only :)