So, the dust has settled, and the 2007 Blender conference is over. This year the conference was moved to a newer, more modern venue and featured loads of announcements, heaps of great artwork, and a diverse crowd from all imaginable fields and backgrounds. We had a presentation sunday morning with Nathan in a bunny suit (!) announcing the following:

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Last week the artists were mostly on the other side of the institute, the presentation/workshop room. That enabled Campbell, Brecht and me to break open the floor, remove all the old network cables, and create a 1 gig network with a dedicated cable for every workstation to the central switch, connected to the server. About 300 meters of cables was being added!

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Yo yo yo! Wuz up in da hood, dawgz! We been kajizzling some story/animation dope, yo. Our bro Arno been schoolin’ us some badass ropes ’bout da preproduction and da storyboardin’ and da… t.i.m.i.n.g’! Weez gonna lay down some awesome animation beatz, homies.

Dis da program, yo:

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And that was the first day in of Peach… Nine people working here in the Blender Institute now, and it feels like a good start!

Today I did a short the kick-off welcome (“don’t worry, I don’t expect you do make anything but an awesome funny movie!”) and hand over the organization to Arno Kroner. He’s going to train the team of artists for five days in all aspects of visual storytelling, staging and storyboarding. Arno also was a great help as story/script consultant the past month… ooh, this script is going to be so cool! Can’t wait to see the movie!

Then I took Brecht and Campbell apart to discuss and design an infrastructure for the offices network (server, backup disks, switches, phone, fax, wifi). This we will work on the next few days, plus installing all systems and setting up the server (svn) and accounts.

And then of course I should mention we met our first milestone; getting a 1000 dvds sold in advance! At the time of writing this blog entry, we had 1144 orders in, of which 947 were paid. That’s totally awesome, thanks everyone for this support! (Needless to say: keep ordering & paying!)

Later more,

-Ton-

As you can all see, the pre-sale of dvds is going to pass the 1000 mark in a couple of days! That’s excellent, everyone here is very grateful for this support. This week is also the last chance to get a dvd ordered with discount, and with your name added to the credits.
Do note that the name credit is only for those who pay before october 1! Only for bank orders we’ll allow a couple of days delay.

More production news updates:

• The Peach project is going to be supported by the Dutch “Digital Pioneers” fund, they will cover almost all the costs for the two developers, Brecht and Campbell. That I already know for a month, but I didn’t announce it before they have it officially on their website… which is still pending.
• Starting October 12th, first day of the conference, I will be assisted by Margreet Riphagen. She will then become Producer in the Blender Institute, responsible for all organizational tasks involved with running this place and its projects succesfully. The best part of this news is that I then have plenty of more time for working on development again! I expect to be coding again in november latest. Really!
• We’ve found a hardware sponsor, Maqina! Not that we get everything for free… but with significant discounts, way below cost price for this dealer. That means we can also afford the really good stuff. Everyone gets Eizo monitors, for example! More about this company later.

Tomorrow we’ll do more construction work though… two walls are going to be removed (we remove the dark room “to lock up bad coders”), to make a 2nd studio room for people to work in.
-Ton-

More updates on the production:

1. Development roadmap page added. This is not the final page, but based on the notes I’ve made during the workshop last week.
2. Six month planning has been added. Oh yes, that does resemble last time! Note that horrible timing of the Siggraph festival deadline again…
3. Arno Kroner, trainer at Disney Feature Animation, teaching at Woodbury University and showrunner of Siggraph ‘s FJORG agreed on coming to Amsterdam to organize our first week. He’s planning to do a full week workshop about all aspects of visual storytelling, storyboarding, layout, scene planning and acting. He’s also helping us now as script consultant.
4. William Reynish came over to Amsterdam yesterday to get the full briefing, and of course we had to check on him (and he on us!). This went all great, he’s a funny guy even! Welcome to the team dude!

Time keeps flying, and then it’s suddenly thursday… and still no workshop overview post! Of course I blame this to Andy and Bassam, who are distracting me in the offices while working on recording their training video (dvd) project. You don’t want to know how difficult it is get video/audio recorded and edited in Open Source… but that’s for another time to complain!

The workshop week has resulted in a lot of useful material. I’ve got many pages of notes here to work out still… about the script, Blender features, the studio pipeline and the production planning. All of this will become separate pages (and blog posts here) during the next few days.

A couple of real news items I do want to discuss right now though.

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The five Peach artists and one of the developers have arrived in Amsterdam for a week of preproduction work in Amsterdam. (We’re almost complete, only Campbell still is crock hunting in Northern Australia!). In this picture you can see Andy, Lyubomir, Enrico, Sacha, Nathan and Brecht discussing story concept drawings. Also check the media gallery for more shots of the team. If you watch closely you can even notice already where our concept is heading at…

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As for the previous Open Movie, we depend on your help to be able to realize this project! You can do that by purchasing the DVD edition of Peach in advance. Our target is to get at least 1000 DVDs sold before the start of the project, october 1st.

Everyone who orders and pays the DVD before october 1st will get a discount and his/her name credited in the movie credit roll!

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Here’s a quick tour in the very cool office where we’ll make the Peach Open Movie. Most of it is undecorated and unfurnished still. But, we keep that wallpaper!