Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

David Revoy made a cool series of banners, for everyone who likes to help us promoting the campaign. Add it to your websites! 🙂

Further short news snippets:

• We presented Blender 2.5 and the Durian project prominently at Siggraph (see picture). I brought about 250 BBB dvds as give-aways which caused quite some amazement… giving away free stuff? Yeah, but then just buy the durian dvd now!
• Several companies at Siggraph expressed interest to support Durian, especially to support us making it stereo/3d. All of this is tentative still, doing follow-ups now.
• I’m also invited as a speaker on IBC – http://www.ibc.org – the leading international conference and gigantic tradeshow for the digital media industry. Will be great networking opportunity!
• Colin is currently working with Martin Lodewijk about first script treatments, things are looking very promising. Will need to kick Martin a bit to speed-up so we can get to work on breakdown and storyboards in september.
• In less than two weeks, all the Durian artists (+ Brecht & me) will come over to Amsterdam for the pre-production week! Is going to be exciting, expect fun stories and pictures here all week.
• More gold sponsors in! Check sponsor page… we’re also very proud of the presale campaign sofar, goes great!

-Ton-

Similarly to how we’ve realized projects Orange, Peach and Apricot, we organize a donation campaign to collect funding for Durian.

You can help us to realize this film by purchasing the DVD edition of Durian in advance!

We’ve also decided to go for a triple disk DVD this time, which will have at least:

• The movie (approx 6-8 min) in best DVD quality widescreen format (disks in both NTSC and PAL).
• The HD version of the movie (.avi and/or .mov).
• The third disk with a lot of video tutorials by the artists and developers.
• All .blend files, models, textures, and so on… the material used to create the movie.
• The original script, breakdown, storyboards.
• Documentation and other tutorials by the team members about all technical aspects the movie; like how to re-use assets, animate characters, or add new shots.
• And of course all the extras we can’t predict yet, like commentary tracks, a making-of documentary, outtakes, and so on.

Get your credit!

If you purchase and pay the DVD by september 15th latest, you can get your name mentioned on the official movie credit scroll! To make sure the crediting works fine, we will remind everyone via email a month before the movie goes to premiere.

As you can notice on the campaign “money meter”, we target at a pre-sale of 2000 this time. Very ambitious, but the targets for this project are ambitious too. Order now!

General donations are welcome too, check the Sponsor Prospectus for offerings, or use the Donate button there.

Thanks for the support!

The Durian Team

After all agendas and urgent other todos have been aligned, here’s the final dates for the next steps:

• Second half of July (to be announced): Durian pre-sale campaign starts
• August 24-28: preproduction week for all team members here in Amsterdam
  (script ready!)
• September: Colin, David and Martin finalize breakdown and work on storyboard
• Oct 5th: real start of the Durian project!

As you can notice, it has been shifted a little bit… especially the preproduction workshop week was more convenient to move to after Siggraph. The month of July I’ll have other urgent work to do as well. 😉

This month Martin will work on his scenario, with help of Colin. During august the rest of the team then can get involved with it, and we should be able to finalize it all in the workshop here. Colin and David then stay, working on getting the full breakdown and storyboards ready.

Also great news is that the Netherlands Film Fund decided to support Durian! We receive first some funding for the concept/storyboarding phase, and when we show something good, their support will be continued to cover up for a significant part of our costs!

The last week of september we also will organize an advanced Blender course here, led by Andy Goralczyk, and most likely supported by the durianers who then hangout here as well. If you want to participate in this great opportunity, visit this page for more info.

OK, back to work, will keep you all updated!

-Ton

Out of the almost 150 submissions, we’ve had the difficult job to pick five names of people to join us for the Durian project here in Amsterdam. The overall quality of submissions was just amazing, we could have easily picked 30 of them!

With Colin, David and Brecht we managed to get the list trimmed down to 24. Based on feedback from some expert artists it was then brought down to about 12, and then still… but strictly based on evident skills we need, and getting a good all-round expertise, the five new Durian members are:

• Angela Guenette (modeling, rigging, animation)
• Ben Dansie (3D generalist)
• Nathan Vegdahl (rigging, animation)
• Lee Salvemini (animation)
• Soenke Maeter (shading, light, compositing)

This in addition to:

• Colin Levy (director, 3D generalist)
• David Revoy (concept art)

I’m also very happy to announce we can get for technical support again the talents of:

• Brecht van Lommel
• Campbell Barton

I would like to thank everyone for sending in their enthusiast submissions! Everyone should have had an email from me by now too. We also have a small back-up team, in case we can find additional funding, or an amazing result of the DVD pre-sale campaign (which will start in 3-4 weeks).

And: check the updated “about” page, for more information, mugshots and portfolio links!

-Ton-

Great news, DivX Inc. has signed up for our Main Sponsor offer!
Having used raw material from our previous Open Movies in the past, they’re very interested in getting Durian footage in the highest quality, including subtitles and extras, for technical tests and distribution. They will further assist us on making the best quality DivX encoded versions of our movie, also for distribution via our website.

Thanks!

(BTW, also two Gold Sponsors have signed up, check the sponsoring page)

-Ton-

Yeez, you guys have made it difficult for us! At least a 100 more submissions than we had for our previous movie project… it’s simply amazing to notice how much Blender has become attractive for good quality 3D artists.

Everyone who submitted should have had an email from me now, if not, just remind me! Everyone will get a mail from me before or on june 20. When the proposed candidates have accepted, we’ll announce the team… will be on or shortly after june 20.

Thanks!

-Ton-

(NOTE: our current Akismet spam filter is far too strict, we will switch to Spam Karma soon… if your post doesn’t show up, wait a bit we’ll fix it manually now!)

Just a short reminder, there’s one week left to send in your interest to join us in Amsterdam for this exciting 3D adventure! Check the link below for more information. Closing date is June 10th, 1700h UTC.

Call for participation