Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Hey folks… wondering why we are so silent? Today was the deadline for submitting proposals for getting funding by the Dutch Film Fund – who already supported us with a nice amount for the story development phase. It meant a lot of discussions, writing, reviews, turning ideas up and down, making concept art, and that kind of stuff. And not to forget filling in the forms, make a booklet, and – oh dear – translate everything to Dutch! 🙂

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A 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-

I took my saturday freetime to visit Artis , the big Zoo of Amsterdam ; more precisely to enjoy a sketch session in the zoo , and spend time with animals. I worked on my sketchpad ( around 21cmx15cm , A5  bristol paper  , I don’t advice it to beginner cause it will block you to have a “too precious” paper – prefer a paper that you can “waste” without any trouble … btw, I can waste bristol without any trouble ). My pencil is a large 2B and dark sketching pencil from Derwent, but any “soft” black marking pencil are good for this. I use too a soft kneaded eraser , cause sometime I miss a Ctrl+Z feature to my sketching workflow 🙂

I have some advices if you want to start sketching from life :

• For beginners , prefer to draw simple things, target simple goal at first.
• Take your time. If your model move ; start another sketch ( or finish it by memory )
  
• Find the main lines of the “essence” of your model. Draw them thick & strong.
  
• Don’t focus on details at first. Add them at the end. Draw them thin & light
  
• Understand your model (muscle, light, volume, material, expression)
• Gray shade (when it’s necessary) at the end, do it softly.

Of course , that’s more easy to say , than to do ; here are my zoo sketches  :
– David

PS: I found a cool gang of tux in the zoo , and some zen gnu .

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.

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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:

• The DVD will still be available for pre-order after September 15th and we will still love you for helping out the project! Your name won’t be in the credits though.
• The reason for not having a Blu-Ray presale is not because we overlooked it in some way, but because of the setup costs involved. (If you would like to help us out in that regard, please let us know!)

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!).