Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

DVDs arrived yesterday, and they’re awesome! 4 DVD box, tightly packed so it should arrive everywhere without scratches.

Today we had a packing party here. Order total was 3300 copies already, and each needed to be packed, and sorted by country and sometimes zip code. Luckily there was enough help and it was excellently prepared by our shop team Anja and Anne. With  Dolf, Beorn, Ali, Pablo and Lee + myself, Anja and Anne, it was a fun day and quite a breeze!

Monday TNT post picks it up, and by tuesday and later people can expect it in their mailboxes. Europe should get it within a week, rest of world 2 weeks.

We’re all curious to hear feedback on the product, but we’re definitely proud of it. Feels like a real closure now, said Beorn. And that’s it, although we’ll do another Durian spectacle on the Blender Conference next week! 🙂

-Ton-

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Hey folks! Jan here. It has taken me a bit longer than expected, but I finally got everything together for the traditional mini-album release of the film score. This time, the bundle even contains a few additional goodies, which I really hope you’ll like. But first things first:

The score

This 9-track EP contains every bit of music from the film, including the trailer cue, the DVD menu music, and of course the credits song. Since a lot of people wished for a lossless format, I’ve prepared both 192 kbit MP3 and CD-quality FLAC packages this time. Grab ’em while they’re hot:

• Complete score, 192 kbit VBR MP3, 14.5 MB ZIP
• Complete score, FLAC, 54 MB ZIP

The cover was done by Nick Bueltge (thanks!). Click on it to see the full-res version. The music is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

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About 250 Sintel posters have been delivered to our office now. They are beautiful quality offset-printed,  in original movie poster size: 27 by 40 inches (approx. 70 x 100 cm). Deserves to get a decent spotlight on your wall!

Posters will be sent in a strong cardboard shipping tube. Due to the non-standard size, shipping costs are relatively high though. This is why we will only charge shipping costs once, also when you order more posters.

More information here in the Blender Store!

-Ton-

Sintel 4 DVD Box Set on the Blender Store

Phew, another milestone met… the four DVD masters were sent yesterday to the printer, luckily still in time for the Blender Conference (*). Expected delivery of the copies is next week friday, we then pack all 3200 orders during the weekend (yeah, that’s going to be fun! Luckily our shop manager Anja prepares this for us excellently).
Special thanks to all team members for making tutorials from home, to Jan Morgenstern for all additional sound and music work (including cleaning up 8 commentary tracks), to Pablo Vazquez for weeks of work on the DVD design and to Joeri Kassenaar for mastering the PAL and NTSC discs. You guys will even get 4 GB extra data, the production files were 12 GB in total, heavily compressed… didn’t fit on one DVD.

Preview: Angela Guenette tutorial on facial poses
Preview: Colin Levy tutorial on setting up render and compositing

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Although Sintel has been released, we will still continue to work on re-rendering the film in 4k format (3840 pixels wide, for digital projection or screens). This is being sponsored by the Amsterdam Cinegrid consortium, and will be available (tentatively) end of 2010.
As last and ultimate target we also would love to be able to deliver the film in stereoscopic format. We believe that an open and free accessible ‘stereo 3d’ film has a great potential to become a worldwide test and evaluation standard. It’s currently even open to deliver this in stereo-4k!

Blender Institute intends to produce this with the highest quality possible, which means that all shots in the film will be carefully (re)designed by an experienced stereographer assisted by experienced Blender artists. We also want to spend considerable time on optimizing and implementing an efficient stereographic editing workflow in Blender (camera tools, integrated render, compositing).

You can e-mail Ton Roosendaal to get further information about this sponsoring opportunity.

-Ton-

Sintel is a phenomenal hit on YouTube! We’ve just crossed the million mark, and this will only get better. Reactions there are wonderful too, seems we’ve made everyone cry and stunned! 🙂

Use this link on youtube to see the latest stats for views.

-Ton-

Our short animation film now has been published online for everyone to watch and spread! It’s been an exciting moment for our team, and for everyone who as eagerly awaited this moment. We hope you enjoy it!

Here is the Youtube link, file mirrors and torrents.

Next on our todo is wrapping up the 4-dvd box release, NTSC/PAL discs with extras and documentary, and 2 DVD-ROMs with tutorials, and all the data to reproduce the fim entirely. 🙂

-Ton-