About
Project targets
As usual - like previously for Orange, Peach, Apricot - the Blender Foundation’s interest is to organize projects that will help Blender further:
- Stimulate development of advanced features.
- Validation of Blender by great artists
- Use and improve an open source creation pipeline
- Deliver good publicity and PR for Blender
- Create useful presentation and educational material in Open Content
- Last but not least, provide a fun and inspiring experience for the entire Blender community!
We do this by inviting the best of the talents from the Blender community to work in Amsterdam for half a year or more, in the studio of the Blender Institute. They get excellent working conditions, and full coverage for travel and housing, including a reasonable fee. All of tools we use here for the film are open source, and everything we create, including the final result, is being delivered as free and open content under Creative Commons Attribution.
Durian concept
Since we don’t have to suffer a traditional commercial production method, the team who will execute Durian will get a near unsurpassed freedom in creating it. Some aspects have been frozen though, partially because of the technical targets, partially just do something different than the previous projects.
- Short 3D animation film, 5-8 minutes.
- Epic short story, emotional impact, action scenes
- Targeted at adolescents. Ok, we all still are, right!
- So let’s add a female/girl as main character!
- Visual and conceptual appearance of a typical “Hollywood” blockbuster or game trailer.
Technical targets
- High detail multi-res modeling (sculpting) and render (micropolygons?)
- Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions
- Compositing using tiles/regions, so it becomes resolution independent
- Crowd/massive simulation (fix animation system to allow duplicates)
- Improve library system for managing complex projects
- Deliver in 4k digital cinema (depending agreement with sponsor)
- Make the Blender 2.5x series fully production ready.
Core team
Martin Lodewijk, Concept (Netherlands)
Martin Lodewijk is renowned to be the godfather of Dutch Comic. He is best known as the creator of the comics series “Agent 327″ and as scenarist for Don Lawrence’s Storm series. He excells both in drawing comics, as in concepts and writing. For Durian he has developed several original concepts.
Wikipedia about Martin Lodewijk
Martin Lodewijk portfolio, lambiek.net
Wikipedia about Don Lawrence, Storm
Esther Wouda, Screenplay (Netherlands)
Esther Wouda is an experienced script consultant and creative producer. Since 1999 she selected and developed movies and tv series for (Eyeworks) Egmond Film, Oscar®-winning producer of Antonia. Esther establishd in 2008 a new company Gloworm Flm, script consultancy for writers and producers in the film indstry
Colin Levy, Director (USA)
Colin is one of these rare young people with an insatiable desire to create films. He is already active with Blender as 3D animator and vfx artist for many years, and recently started a study as film maker at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Currently he is filming his short film “En Route” in Savannah. For Durian his target is to work on a great story with convincing characters, a short movie with emotional impact people can attach to.
Colin’s website and production log
David Revoy, Concept Art (France)
David already has a great professional history as freelance concept artist, art director and illustrator for many studios and publishers. He’s a very proficient CG artist, using open source drawing programs (Gimp, MyPaint) as well as Blender for his work. His epic fantasy style will greatly define how Durian will look, although he will make it more dark and evil than his usual free artwork!
Nathan Vegdahl (USA)
Nathan has been involved with Blender already for almost a decade, also as a developer. In the 2004-2007 period he studied animation and rigging. In 2007 he became the rigging guru for the Big Buck Bunny movie. Nathan is very all-round, but his passion is with character animation, for which we can use his talent and great fun personality very well!
Nathan’s portfolio and youtube reel.
Angela Guenette (Canada)
Angela was the big surprise submission for Durian, standing out with an amazing quality portfolio. She will definitely bring in a lot of valuable animation movie experience! She’s a great character modeler, sculptor, animator, and is specialized in facial rigging and shape keys.
Ben Dansie (Australia)
Ben is a well known regular in our Blender channels, amazing everyone regularly with new artwork and animations. It was very cool to witness his artistic development over the years. He’s a true 3D generalist, with special skills in modeling, sculpting, texturing and creating renders with great looking results. Ben graduated Visual Arts (University South Australia), and currently works on a cinematic for a games studio.
Ben’s application reel on Vimeo
Soenke Maeter (Germany)
Soenke’s artwork illustrates very well why we wanted him in this team. He’s a real finisher, someone totally devoted to make breathtaking visuals. His skills is mostly in non-organic (environment) modeling, lighting, rendering and compositing.
Lee Salvemini (Australia)
Lee definitely stood out with a submission that showed sheer passion for our epic & action concept. Everyone who knows him, is familiar with his devotion to animate action shots with cool warrior girls, preferably in a stylish anime fashion. We’ve already worked with Lee 4 years ago, on our first open movie Elephants Dream. Lee currently works in a games studio on animatics for a Lucas Star Wars game.
(portfolio currently not available yet…)
Brecht van Lommel, Software Developer (Belgium)
Brecht is currently a full time employee of Blender Institute, working on realizing the next 2.5 release. He’s an all-round talent, and proven to be incredibly valuable and supportive for the artist teams of past Peach and Apricot projects. His special interests are in the imaging and rendering area, of which we expect he will make great contributions!
Campbell Barton, Technical Director (Australia)
Campbell is one of the most active developers of Blender since many years. He is very all-rounded, but specialized in Python work and scripting. He previously was available in the same role for the Big Buck Bunny movie and the Yo Frankie! game projects. We’re all very happy to have his experience and support available again!
Ton Roosendaal, Producer (Netherlands)
Ton’s experience with 3D started in the ’90s, making animation for video and product presentations. During that period he also developed Blender, which became open source in 2002. Since then he works as Blender Foundation chairman to coordinate the blender.org projects, and for Blender Institute as producer for short film projects like Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny.
For Durian he is responsible for all organizational and financial tasks, and ensure the project targets are met.
Music and sound design
Based on our excellent past experience with Jan Morgenstern and his studio Wavemage, we’ve contacted him to help with Durian as well. He has committed to provide us services for music, sfx, sound edit and mix again, which makes Wavemage our first official Premium Sponsor!
Free/Open Source software
For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot. Next to these, we’ll explore the very promising paint programs MyPaint and Krita. Render output will be in OpenEXR. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Linux, distro and desktop environment is to be defined later. We intend to build our own render farm this time, for which a free software solution will be required as well.
Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.
Bottlenecks in past projects were especially for DVD authoring and high quality video and sound (5.1) encoding, for which we’ve partially used non-free programs as well. Hopefully we can solve it this time with free software solutions!
Obviously we’re very interested to be in contact with free/open source projects of any kind, to check on what we can do together.
Budget
The Blender Foundation/Institute will fully backup the financial and practical aspects of Durian. Apart from the funding we will get via the online DVD pre-sale, and funding via other revenues of the blender.org e-shop, we have actively approached several potential sponsors and funds. Outlook is very realistic we can provide a better budget for Durian than for previous projects, but let’s not announce anything before the signatures were put down!
As a minimum, we can afford to have 6 people working here, for 4-6 months, but we aim at having 8-9 people for 8 months.
We also have a sponsor offering on this website, corporate contributions - also good quality hardware - is still more than welcome.
Help needed: actors, stunts, artists…
Actors: Most certainly, Durian will have dialogs and/or voice-over. Finding good voice actors locally I can manage, but best is of course finding actors with international star quality! Anyone who reads this with movie industry connections in UK or USA should consider to contact me to make it happen!
Stunts & choreographers: At the Big Buck Bunny premiere I was contacted by a stunt/show fighter from the BanGang team. They already volunteered to help us with action choreography and video references. (We are not going to do motion capture btw, this project better focuses on more common affordable techniques). I’m very interested to be in contact with similar teams who like to volunteer, especially with female fighters. An experienced action choreographer for consultancy is welcome too!
Online help from artists: whenever possible and appropriate, we’d like to involve artists as a ‘2nd unit’ as well. Requirements for such artists are similar to those who will work here. Wait for the project to start to learn more about how to get involved.
Online help from developers: this will be coordinated via the regular official blender.org development channels.
Documentation: one of the problems in past projects was lack of time, energy and competence to create high quality documentation and reports. Ideally we could add a person to the team with this task, but budget won’t allow to do this most likely. Currently we discuss with Tony Mullen to become an online team member, to write and edit a “Durian Workbook”, which we can publish and sell in print, as well as release in open content.
Translators: the DVDs/Bluray of course needs subtitles in many languages. We will do a call for translators in due time, but seek an experienced DVD authoring talent who can help us coordinating this work.
Public weeklies: during the project, we will do weekly presentations (typically friday afternoon) of progress in our studio, for which we always like to welcome a couple guests to give valuable feedback. The weeklies will be open for everyone, but only by confirmed appointment. Contact information and scheduling you’ll be able to find on this site later.
Contact info: Ton Roosendaal.