Sintel, the Durian Open Movie ProjectWelp, this week has been entirely dedicated to story and coming up with a final script, so it’s taken me some time to wade through the footage from the preproduction week.
Finally had some time to churn it out today. A bit long, but check it out!
Preproduction Workshop from Project Durian on Vimeo.
I take the opportunity of having a first WIP post about a “not totally but” rejected early concept art. So ; I will explain here the key moment of my workflow for 2D environnement , It will probably sound strange ; but I’m using mainly at first not Alchemy or Mypaint in this case but …. Blender ! Let’s me show you how and Why:
Simple lowpoly object, fun and speed to do
Why start with Blender ? Simply cause it’s time saving. as a drawer a city represent a lot of work for the perspective / the design / the light and the angle of camera ( composition too ) ; with the help of Blender I can compress this time to a couple of hour.
First job is to create some toys ; and have a little library of some objects ; I started here with a subdivided cube for each of those objects ; after removing some faces of the cube to preserve 1/4 of the shape , I apply a mirror modifier and most of the time apply to the Y and X axis. I model this way only 1/4 of each building.I use the last layer of “Blender layers panel” to stock my blocks, and I take care to name them correctly. When finish ; I do a first Alt+D copy ( linked copy to the original ) , and move the copied object to the first layer. Why I named them correctly ? ( ex : Building_1 / City_Wall / etc… ) Simply cause this kind of simple 3D object I like to reuse them in other works with a simple “append”, so it’s always faster to know what to append in the long long object list.
A screen capture of my 3D speed town , while editing the "moutain"
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.
As a student, I kept drawing / doodling during my classes ( teachers didn’t like that and -in the end- it’s not helped my studies but more my drawing skills ). I was really surprised to see this didn’t change a lot during the preproduction workshop; so I kept drawing / painting with very few early ideas.
I basically used watercolors ( Winsor & Newton ) on a strong bristol A3 paper ; adding some lines with markers / pencil and white lines with a typex like corrector.
So, those pictures above do not reflect any real concept art I want for Durian, but I just wanted you to have a look on my table side, and share some comments on those (too) early concepts 🙂
( PS: Thx Colin for the photo )
-David
I was looking to fight jet lag by staying awake this afternoon, which is always helped by keeping active in some way. While I was out for a walk I thought it would be a cool idea to do a bit of matte painting work and remembered I took some cloud photos from the plane. With that as inspiration and reference I made the following as a quick 4K test.
Having created 4K textures plenty of times, working with the physical pixel width isn’t that new to me, but I think it is really exciting to see it as an image as it would appear in the film. Just think of it – every single frame of Durian will have this resolution and hopefully most frames will be loaded with even more detail.
For content creation and data management that starts to get a little scary (it was fun to watch Colin’s face each time Ton mentioned something he wanted to try in 4K), but as someone who loves details I’m personally very excited about the idea. We haven’t decided on a final aspect ratio but we think somewhere between 2.35:1 and 2.5:1 to capture the epic cinema feeling. This image is 2.35:1 give or take a pixel.
Finally, we are still working on the story so the image doesn’t really give anything away. We have decided to keep the story a surprise for the premiere, but we plan to openly share basically everything else as we develop it. Figured that was the best way to be as open as possible but still have a rewarding film at the end.
– Ben.
PS – http://picfindr.com/ – cool website for searching stock images that can be filtered via license.
Hello Blender Community! First post on the Durian blog. It’s great to be here in Amsterdam and I’m extremely excited about (and slightly intimidated by) the project and the work ahead! We’ve got a killer team here and we’ve had a fantastic week of preproduction. I’m a bit overwhelmed really– Ton’s kept us really busy!
One thing on the agenda was to go out and actually do something in the city. So yesterday Ton sent us out to visit a local Amsterdamian museum, and we brought along the studio camera to document our journey. (David and Brecht preferred to be productive and stayed in the studio.) Check out the video:
Visit to the Tropenmuseum from Project Durian on Vimeo.
–Colin
(Note: Sorry for not putting it on the title card, but both tracks of music for this video are licensed under Creative Commons.)
