Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

We already had a small contribution from the Dutch Film Fund to develop the script and storyboards. After a careful deliberation the Film Fund board today decided to also grant us support for the realization of the film. This will allow us to extend the project with three months (end of June), cover up for much needed expenses (like voice actors, hardware, PR) and most likely even extra team members!

We’re all incredible happy here… Sintel is very complex to make, much more than previous projects. This additional funding – which nearly doubles our current budget – is crucial for that.

In past conversations the Film Fund’s main concerns were with the quality of our projects, to some extent the movies didn’t exceed the level of a technical demos. It’s a great confirmation of our current work and quality demands that we now have their blessing this time. 🙂

-Ton-

Short news snippets from the producer’s office:

• We’ve found a fighting choreographer and consultant: Man-Lung Tang! According Man-Lung his name means “Wise Dragon”, he’s running a Kung Fu school here in Amsterdam, and acted and advised on several dutch films and tv series. He loves stunt fighting, and is specialized in acting getting hurt badly! (See picture, copied from www.kit.nl).
  Man-Lung will arrange for us an afternoon of choreography rehearsing in his studio, using other fighters as well (incl a girl). All of this will be recorded in HD and put online, of course!
• Monday we get Ben Dansie here! Team then is starting their third month already… time to get serious!
• We’ve updated the website with a ‘get involved’ link. New is also an invitation for visiting the studio “Weekly”. Everyone’s welcome to see what we do, but please first make an appointment with me.
• Use the forums if you want to contact us! Check on the ‘get involved’ page… you can post issues or suggestions there.
• I’m still trying to get famous voice actors… will know more in a week hopefully.
• Funding: we know soon a decision what the Dutch Film Fund will do. The Cinegrid Consortium subsidy (for 4k digital cinema) is still waiting for some province government signature here… already takes months to settle. If this subsidy doesn’t get available soon, I’ll move that budget to the next open movie!
• Colin will finish storyboarding in a week, we’ll also get a final breakdown then and make a full final project plan. (Remind Colin to give another Directorial Address! Oh, and post the animatic of first minute 🙂
• And the rest? Soenke is modeling the first city environment. Nathan is doing his rigging magic. Lee modeled a bad guy, and already started animating a shot. Angela is modeling dragons now. They all will blog about their work soon too.
• Oh! And there’s a new main sponsor: www.coreel.com

-Ton-

David Revoy, concept artist for Durian, finished his time at the Blender institute in Amsterdam and went back to France on tuesday, november 24th.

David left the Blender institute from Project Durian on Vimeo.

-Ali-

Some weeks ago I was looking into clouds and whether we need to paint them or if we can use actual 3d clouds. My first try was more an accident than an attempt.

While looking into methods to create massive amounts of trees for far away shots with hair, a simple render showed up after pressing f12. Slight tweaking of materials revealed that it might be possible to do clouds with hair but doing a quick 4k render showed that the number of hairs would need to be much too high.

Some time went by and I tried out doing clouds with volumetrics, which I should have done in the first place… It looks much more promising, is quick to set up and it’s animatable, perfect for our project.

The file bellow shows the volumetric clouds. The scaling is too big and will be different in final shots. The colors are a result of a simple rgb-curve in the render compositor.

simple_volumetric_clouds.blend

Have a nice day.
-soenke

click to enlarge

Here some of the concept art concerning the first minute of the movie. Shaman changed to the definitive one after some Al.chemy research, the shaman hut got some drawings too, and the guardian “Jack” got a portrait to help modelling I painted some weapons :  the knife of Sintel, and the blades of the guardians. And to finish my period at the institute in beauty ; I wrote especially for the community a tutorial about my speedpainting process, as you asked me in the previous “1st minute concept art” post.

I’m back to Toulouse (France) tomorrow , but I will surely keep blog posting sometimes as I will continue to work remotely on the Durian. I hope you will enjoy !

-David

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The past few weeks Lee has been hard at work designing the Gatekeeper Fight. It’s not as easy task! We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to visualize the fight scenes, because a written beat sheet only can communicate so much, and blocky animatics can be somewhat difficult to read.

So. To better visualize the fight, the team decided to go out and record ourselves clobbering each other with mops and broomsticks.

Check it out.

Fight Choreography Experiment from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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For the past week or so I’ve been doing tests with the cloth simulation in Blender. Nothing too fancy, but just trying to shake out the most obvious issues before we try to use it directly in production.

The basic cloth simulation–how the cloth moves–already works quite well:

Cloth Test 01 from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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