Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Well, I am at the airport about to begin the long journey back home. Nathan’s hugging has caught on with most of the team now. I thought I would take the time to give a bit of an insider view as someone who is joining an Open Movie team for the first time and has also never been to Amsterdam.

The city itself is fantastic! It is familiar enough to feel like home and different enough to feel like an adventure at the same time. The people (mainly the team) help a lot with this welcoming feeling. However, this isn’t a tourist blog – we have travelled from our respective corners of the globe to make an awesome movie!

The main thing I have taken from this week that will be hopefully be as uplifting for the community as it was for the team is that storyline will be king. I’m not just saying this to calm any fears about the story being weak just because there is action – we are all genuinely pouring a lot of ourselves into the story to have it as strong as possible right from the start. We scheduled in several sessions at the beginning of the week to make sure the story was discussed, but from day one nearly all our spare time seemed to naturally come back to story discussion. How would characters react to certain events? Why would the world we are creating work in such a way? What would be the most logical yet engaging way to tie all the various plot points together?

During these times we began to watch the first of many clips and short films as examples come to mind. The language barriers can sometimes be less of an issue than the creative ones – ie. making sure we are all on the same page with a certain concept. For the most part, it seems that our collective ideas on what we envision ‘Durian’ to be are already quite consistent which is an amazing feeling.

Of course you have seen in previous posts that there has been much discussion on other aspects of the project such as development targets, team roles and so on – but each discussion comes back to the story concepts in some way with a resolve to make them stronger.

Epic fun – Epic win! 🙂

– Ben

Hooray! We passed 1000 DVD sales! A great landmark!

Now we need to get to 2000! Come on, we can do it!

–Nathan

Today we discussed Blender features, trying to get an overview of the things the artists really need to complete the project. This is only a rough overview, we didn’t discuss all topics yet, a more complete and detailed list will be compiled later, for developers interested in getting involved.

Modelling and Sculpting

• Sculpting: the main challenge here is performance, supporting more polygons and smoother interaction. We have various strategies to achieve this, it will be interesting to see how far we can push it. Better brush tools are also welcome, we expect these can be implemented quite efficiently as artists start using the system and provide feedback.
• Multiresolution: we intend to improve the new multiresolution infrastructure for sculpting and rendering, preferably supporting high polygon meshes without any baking steps inbetween.
• BMesh: n-gons and the associated modelling tools would be useful, but they are not a must have for this project. Still it may be worthwhile to use the Durian project as a way to get BMesh tested and completed, we’ll have to evaluate the status of this project in October.

Rigging and Animation

• Rigging likely will not require deep changes, most new features here will be focused on various relatively small changes to make the system more flexible for building better rigs and presenting a good interface to the animator.
• Proxies will need to be improved, for example to support multiple instances of a character with variations.
• Animating the camera position and rotation by doing real life recording would be an interesting feature to have. Motion tracking would be needed for this, completely using open source tools of course, and the libmv project is a promising candidate. This would not be natively integrated, but use a script most likely.
• The new animation system in 2.5 will be extensively used, but I don’t have a good overview what kind of feature requests will come up here yet. We’ll likely discuss things in more detail with the riggers and animators later this week.

Physics

• In this project we’ll have a lot of chances to use the physics systems. Big Buck Bunny did not use physics much, as many of the tools where not at the level we needed, with Durian we will try to get the physics systems production ready.
• Physics must work with the Proxy system, to support working with physics simulation in typical library linked setups, and it must get better support for using caches/bakes in production setups and on render farms.
• Cloth simulation is already quite advanced. We intend to use it on the main characters, so inevitably we will run into various issues that will need to be fixed, to get this up to the level that we can use it for close ups in 4K.
• Hair simulation is another effect that we would like to use on main characters. The current system for this is not up to the task, as for example hair volume is not taken into account. How to get good hair simulation working is still unknown.
• Smoke and Particles will be great for various effects, the recent developments in these areas are very welcome, we’ll follow closely and evaluate how to get these working efficiently for us.
• Rigid body dynamics would be great to have as well, Bullet is up to the task, but it should be properly integrated, not through the game engine.

Rendering

• Rendering scenes with much more detail is one of the targets. This requires changes throughout the rendering engines, from per-tile geometry subdivision, to image and shadow tile disk caching.
• Volumetrics are useful for rendering dust, smoke and explosions for example, and this of course fits our theme very well. We’ll need to evaluate the system to see how well it works in full production scenes regarding performance and memory usage.
• The shading system can use a good review to evaluate correctness and make it more extensible for future improvements, and we hope to work with other developers on this. For Durian we’re working with very detailed scenes, which likely excludes raytracing or photon mapping for us, so it would be good to get a structure that can accommodate various approaches.

Compositing

• Working with 4K resolution will require us to make this system tile based, so that large images can be composited without running out of memory.
• We’ll also need to figure out a workflow for working with lower resolution images than the full 4K, and only for the final rendering do the full resolution.

Brecht.

Hi,

Soon to be linked here better; there’s also a blender.org forum where people can share ideas or communicate about our Open Projects. It hasn’t been used too extensively in the past – this blog already gave enough to talk about – but it sometimes works very well!

Check for example on an interesting new thread about open source audio tools, and the role Durian could play in it:
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15608

-Ton-

Today, each artist of the project presented a couple of clips or graphics, and talked about style or visual impact as examples for us to look at. You can see this as an extension of the moodboard.

Soenke:

Gametrailer link to Starcraft

I like this clip because it is epic and you can study things like lighting, texturing, compositing, smoke and a lot more.

For example the texturing is very strong in this clip and you can very well see how the textures fit onto the different objects and how they react to the topology.

Nathan:

Hero:
The way they use landscapes and environments lends the movie a sense of scale and weight. Also, they make great use of visual symbolism,
especially with color. And of course there’s great martial arts.

Doll Face:
Nothing at all to do with the genre or style of Durian, but I like the simplicity and poetry of the story. If we can give Durian’s story some real poetry and soul, I’ll be very happy.

Starcraft 2 trailer:
The pacing of this trailer is fantastic: a slow, weighty beginning (a calm before the storm/building up tension) followed by kick-ass action. Without the silence before, the action wouldn’t seem nearly as significant.

Ben:

Gametrailer.com Diablo

As this clip is a game trailer, there is not as much to take from it regarding story telling because it is only selling a much larger story. Most of what I studied it for is the overall mood of the world (visual style, locations, inhabitants and so on) and the editing and shot choice.

The fact they can convey so much of an epic world in under two minutes of visuals was fantastic. Breaking it into thirds, the first scene is the very humble act of lighting a candle, followed by a much larger scale of decimated environments (without action) and only the final third contains the evil action. Deciding to allocate the pace that way even with the short timeframe was the main aspect I took from the piece.

David:

I presented to the team some pictures like this portrait from Kim Jong-Sook , that have a “final fantasy” like proportion of face but with a particular work on the skin material and shading. Interresting in my opinion as we plan to render 4K.

Lee:

Final Fantasy XIII (Versus)

Cinematography, the way they build up anticipation to a climax, its not as much fighting as your mind thinks at the end, easier for artists,
makes climax more satisfying with a build up.

Final Fantasy XI Opening

The emotion between sister saving brother, shows a simple story, but brings up emotion and keeps the audience interested and connected. The
boy at the start pinching over the building with his hand, and again to show its the same person grown up at the end, gives full circle to this
part of the story, and as a comedian does a joke and refers to it soon after, the audience feel they are ‘inside’ and know the character more
in such a short time.

Angela:

The clip I chose is taken from the movie “Kill Bill – Volume I” (begins at 3:30 – “The Origin of O-Ren”). I chose it for 2 main reasons:

1- To raise discussion on how blood/gore may or may not be used in project Durian
2- To discuss the element of character development/motivation

Although this film is live-action, the flashback is described in dark and gritty 2-D anime style. It gives us a stylized glimpse into this characters head, illustrating why she is the way she is, does the things she does. Elements such as music, pace, camera direction, and even the use of blood effectively work together to fit its specific purpose.

Colin:

I decided to talk about the short film Oktapodi, an extremely successful animated short from a bunch of students from Gobelins. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth the watch! http://www.oktapodi.com/

Although project Durian will have a completely different visual style and tone, I think we have a lot to gain from breaking down great animation (and film) of all types. Oktapodi is a really a nearly-flawless animation in my opinion. It tells a simple yet compelling story in an extremely succinct way. They make it look easy. But there were a lot of decisions about pacing and shot design and visual style that just seem extremely carefully considered. The staging, lighting, designs, music… everything just seems to come seamlessly together. I tend to focus more on shot design and editing, and these elements are what really make this film stand out in my mind. There are just a lot of great shots, and they do a lot to make the sequences dynamic.

To illustrate just one little detail I liked about the shot design, let’s break down the first two shots of the movie. First of all, the entire premise of the movie is set up in the first two shots. In less than 20 seconds into the film, we understand the entire conflict and thrust of the plot. But the spatial relationships between the two shots are what really interest me. The first shot ends with the male octopus looking outside the tank, and we CUT to a reverse shot of what essentially is his point of view. The girl octopus looks helplessly towards the camera as she is weighed and thrown into a cooler… but then the human character removes the cooler from the frame and reveals our main character in the background! What is understood as a point of view shot becomes a wide-angle of the male octopus. This is just an example of extremely clever shot design which I think is a big part of making this film so entertaining to watch.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with shot design for Durian to find the most effective way to tell our story!

Yesterday all Durian artists arrived here in Amsterdam for the pre-production week, a week of discussions, reviews, brainstorms, pipeline designs, styling proposals, watching clips, and of course a lot of fun to get to know each other.

The agenda for the week has been defined this morning as follows:

Monday
– 10h: welcome, going over all topics to make final agenda
– 14h: Script/story review sofar
– 16h: Martin Lodewijk visiting to do the script pitch

Tuesday
– 10h: Style and design: each artist shows a clip and explains why it’s cool or not
– 14h: Blender review: features for the film, as well usability roadmap for 2.5 project

Wednesday
– 10h: Animation! Tools, techniques, video references, kung fu courses, etc
– 12h: Lighting, textures, use of GI, final gathering, etc… how images can look great!
– 14h: Field trip to Amsterdam, probably the Tropical Museum (Asian art)

Thursday
– 10h: Communication: Blog, docs, DVDs, tutorials, Durian book, external help
– 14h: Team roles
– 16h: Story/script take two

Friday:
– 10h: Pipeline issues, project planning
– 14h: legal topics, visa, contracts, etc,

While I was typing this after lunch, Martin suddenly showed up, he was early! So I could only finish this text now… Martin delivered three treatments/stories, of which we’ll work out the second, which is about a girl and… an epic dragon!

More later,

-Ton-

(Picture L to R: Nahan, Colin, Brecht, Ben, Angela, David, Soenke, Lee)

As a preview of what to expect in the Durian DVD box – and most probably also an additional title in our “Open Movie Workshop” tutorial DVD series, our concept artist David Revoy made this incredible cool time-lapse video of a concept art painting. His workflow reveals great tips and tricks, a must see for everyone who’s in awe about watching people with artistic skills, and for every artist who is interested to learn from the masters!

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