Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project
Great news! We will have an official film premiere at a renowned festival this time! Today we’ve received confirmation from the Netherlands Film Festival that they’ve accepted Sintel in competition and as a premiere event! The NFF is the biggest film event in the Netherlands, with all our movie stars and crews visiting, and with daily TV coverage.
The festival opens 22nd september, premiere date will be known end of July.
Today Colin and myself recorded a tour of the renderfarm, this shows how its used by artists and the systems which render the frames.
Apologies for accidentally having areas of the video masked (would have been a spoiler).
– campbell
Just digged this up today from the render farm, a mix of test renders, semi-finals and final-finals. All graphics is potentially being updated still, and certainly will be color graded yet. Thanks to our powerful JUSTACLUSTER™ there’s a lot of re-rendering going on, its a great to be able to tweak so much on the render/lighting stage! Just too bad we are using raytracing so much… render times for final quality go to an hour per 2k frame in several cases. Brecht will look into speedups though!
Anyway, enjoy the graphics, and for those who love to write crits, remember: it ain’t done until the fat lady sings!
-Ton-
Hey there! Jan Morgenstern here. I’m responsible for the scoring, sound design, and re-recording mix of Sintel, and I just realized that I’ve been cowardly ducking any blogging duties that might have arised ever since I started working on this project. Clearly, I’m due. For my blog inauguration, I’ve chosen the proven subject of “what am I doing here anyway”.
Hello folks!
Okay, there’s been a lot going on the past few weeks. Sorry it’s taken so long to get a blogpost up! Things are really heating up here and I’m happy to report that we’re all beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel! There’s a LOT of work left but it seems *almost* doable!
So although we do have some stuff to show ya, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been up to recently– I just got back from the States! Just had a short, sorely needed trip to Savannah, Georgia and back. I was nervous the project would totally collapse without me (who am I kidding?)– but seriously, it was nice to not have to scream at Blender for a short while! 😛
Ton asked me to give everyone a full report, so I hastily put together a home-movie-style video of the trip. (Should be entertaining enough, though I beg you not to screencapture my face onto anything else. I feel like I’m handing you some serious ammunition.)
Yo!, Pablo here. *hey before you scroll down to the video, this is work in progress!*
Remember that old blogpost I did the first week I got here?, well, once that shot was “there”, I moved on to light another environment for 2 weeks, then another environment for 2 more weeks.. so I left all the other shots for Sintel’s cabin abandoned, until a week ago that I got time to actually work on it and call it finished.
Dear community,
Here’s a much needed update on the animation front of project Durian. I’d like to take you through some of the challenges and workflows that we employ here in the studio.
We now have a little four man club of animators, (Lee, Jeremy, Beorn and myself) that works as its own mini-team. We have our own dailies, we critique each others work, we help others out whenever we can, and having worked as the sole full-time animator on Big Buck Bunny, this is truly a relief! We have some really positive, respectful team dynamics amongst the animators, which really makes this movie a joy to work on. Of course, I’ve only been here for a few montha, so I’m relieved of any fatigue and burnout (so far!).
However, even with more people and a strong team, this film is no walk in the park. The complexity, the variety and the realism makes the animation particularly difficult to pull off well. You instantly spot when something is off when you get close to realism, and some things are just really hard to get right. Luckily, it can also be very rewarding too. Once the animation is completed, it’s incredibly satisfying to see it nicely lit and rendered by the render team. Suddenly it looks gorgeous!
