Sintel, the Durian Open Movie ProjectA very nice surprise on our bank account yesterday: sponsor DivX Inc upgraded their sponsorship to PREMIUM! That’s a great gesture of commitment, thanks a bunch! Oh… and coincidentally, the Premium Sponsor amount equals to almost 300 DVDs, if we would have put it in our thermometer we’d have had 2000!
-Ton-
Whoa! We’re all totally happy with the level of support we’ve had the past 6 weeks. A whopping 1700 people have signed up to become our first batch of movie investors, and get a credit in the film scroll! Thanks a lot! 🙂
(Hint hint: only if you actually pay for the dvd the credit will be added, the 160 open orders will get a week max to complete the order).
Important: also later orders for the DVDs will get a good credit online and on the ‘thank you section’ of the DVD.
Later more, it seems we’re close to have a great script! I heard!
-Ton-
A first version of the features wishlist is now available. Interested developers are invited to pick up items from this list. For the non simple features, it’s best to contact me or the module maintainer when you start working on it, so design and implementation can be discussed in advance. Note that this list can’t be considered complete yet, it will keep evolving throughout the project.
For the rest of the month September, developers here at the Blender Institute will still be occupied with Blender 2.5. This is the version that the artists will use, which will definitely help getting it ready for real word usage. In October work will start on Durian features, combined with bug fixing or adding missing things in 2.5. But, that doesn’t stop other developers from working on interesting features already.
Hi all!
First of all, thankyou so much to all of you who have supported us so far – both financially with the DVD pre-sale campaign and through positive and constructive comments on the blog, forums and all the other digital forms of encouragement sent our way. It is really affirming to have so many people cheering us on at such an early stage!
Not really wanting to plug the money side of things too much because I know times are a bit tough for many people at the moment, but this is a gentle reminder that if you want your name in the credits of the film as a supporter, the September 15th deadline is coming up.
Also, to clarify some things previously mentioned to do with the pre-sale:
Once again, thankyou for your support on behalf of the team!
-Ben
For each project I like to put our targets a bit higher, not only to have Blender improved, but also to learn more about how to create a good quality short film in general. We’ve done really great the past two films, but most of the criticisms do agree on the fact that we lacked story and scenario development. OK… nice challenge here!
Luckily we have the great benefit this time of a scenario/storyboard development budget from the Dutch Film Fund, which allows – and obliges! – us to take whatever steps possible to have the best scenario when we start in october
As you might recall, I’ve asked 
writer Martin Lodewijk to write us a script, and scheduled all of the month of september with David and Colin here to further develop the scenario and storyboards.
Two weeks ago, when we had the first meeting with Martin, there were three rough outlines of stories written by him, but none of these were ready as scenario. The most promising one was a great concept but lacked storyline and development. Agreed was that we would take this ourselves further, trying to keep it as close as possible to Martin’s original creation.
Last week Colin – with help of the rest – developed a couple of story and screenplay variations. By the end of the week there was one script and story we were quite happy with.
In the meantime I tried to find a couple of good consultants to assist Colin in this process. Yesterday we had the first session of Colin/David and consultant Esther Wouda, which really was a revelation and actually a big relief too! Esther convinced us to go back a few steps, and really do another attempt to design this epic and compelling film with characters people care for, and a story people will remember!
So… exit last Friday’s script, and back to a more challenging but far more satisfying idea… 🙂 It’s a pity we have to sacrifice precious storyboarding time now, but – quoting Colin and probably most of the film makers – “story is everything”! First that, then a film…
Esther Wouda’s website: http://www.glowormfilm.com
Esther’s IMDB credit: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0941870/
Later more!
-Ton-
(Pictures: Esther and Colin working today. Also shot many videos of them, will be great to see how much of this work will be in the final film!).
During the preproduction workshop ( last week ) I started at the restaurant on evening some little cartoons of the Durian team ( black and white on paper ) ; and cause I very liked to work on , I scan them and colorise them with Gimp instead of doing some concept art. ( If some of you are interrested in the technics I use to get this result let me know on the comments ; I can probably write a blog entry with this classical comics workflow ).Note the design of the tee-shirts ; now we must print some “Durian T-shirt” ; and why not on the Blender e-shop ?
Today we went to Cineco with Ton and Colin ( those who follow our Identi.ca or Twitter already know it ) to watch B.B.B in a audio studio with pure ThX Dolby Digital cinema sound ; it was a really good experience, and we enjoyed a lot to talk with them ; very passionate by their work.
Oh and we are happy here cause the money-metter display today a beautifull over 1000 paid 🙂
Thanks !
– David
Why hello! Earlier this week we set up a Twitter account for Durian.
What is Twitter, a tiny portion of you may ask? Twitter is a service which will allow you to keep you completely up-to-date with the excruciatingly mundane details of Project Durian.
Would you like to know, for example, when the director is having a mental breakdown? Or when the rotten milk in the fridge has put our animators out for a week? Would you like to know what features we’re breaking in Blender 2.5?
…of course you would!
Just go to http://twitter.com/BlenderDurian/ and click “Follow” to keep yourself updated. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed. Not too much now, since it’s pretty much just David and I at the studio, but as the project heats up you can expect multiple tweets daily!
In the week or so we’ll also try adding some upgrades to the website to better integrate twitter with our blog.
–Colin
Update: We are also hoping to support identi.ca in the near future, for those who prefer it.
