Entertainment

Say ‘movies’ and one thinks of big production houses enlisting the service of acclaimed directors, larger than life actors, experienced scriptwriters, stuntmen and movie crews, professional recording, editing, sound mixing and marketing teams. Now, imagine if all this was done by people no different from us. It would be disaster, don’t you think? And it certainly would, without proper applications and software which professionals use, most of which come under CSS.

It’s time for things to change. ‘Elephant’s Dream’, a computer generated short film with a runtime of 11 minutes, made entirely with Open Source Software. Tom Roosendaal, chairman, Blender Foundation, is the producer of the movie. Production began in September 2005 and it premiered on March 24, 2006. The movie was made as an experiment rather than for commercial purposes.

The budget for the film was raised by giving the opportunity to people to see their names in the ‘credits’ list if they pre-ordered the DVD. It was completed in a span of 125 days by a team of 7 people collaborating across the globe.

The protagonists of the movie are ‘Proog’ and ‘Emo’ living in a marvelous construction called ‘The Machine’, which the creators originally intended to show as the ‘abstraction’ of a computer. Proog tries to show this world to Emo but Emo is hesitant and strongly argues about its purpose. The plot of the story is not very pronounced due to its abstraction and hence, some critics go the extent of calling the movie pointless. If we delve deeper into the characters, we can draw an analogy. Proog can be considered to be the logical part of the brain, while Emo is the creative part. Proog cannot imagine vibrancy and unpredictability in his world and hence tries to force him viewpoint on Emo.

The core behind the creation of this movie is ‘Blender’, a 3D modeling, texturing, animating, skinning and rendering application which was created by the Blender Foundation. The creditors agreed to release the source code under the GNU general license on a payment of €100,000.

It has a relatively small installation size and is compatible with many operating systems. The user interface is superior to most other graphic engines. It has a fully flexible and configurable user window and has hotkeys for all functions. It has a consistent interface over all platforms with international translation support. Its features are characteristic of a high end software.

It’s ‘rigging’ function has a fast skeleton creation mode, interactive 3-D paint and mirror editing to name a few of the services at offer. The ‘animation’ section has armature deformation with forward and inverse kinematics as its main feature. Blender has angle based UV unwrapping, per-vertex and per-pixel lighting, collision detection and vehicle physics, shadow mapping, motion and rendering as its other main and auxiliary features.
We cannot say that a new generation of producing movies has begun, yet. But this is huge leap forward in that direction. OpenSourceCinema is spearheading a project to create an open source documentary-cum-movie on ‘Copyright in the Digital Age’ and invites one and all to take part in the project.

You can download the movie at http://orange.blender.org/download

The Blender software and its source code is available at http://www.blender.org/

You can contribute to the movie being made by OpenSourceCinema at http://www.opensourcecinema.org/

Inside This Section

Communication

In the super-fast paced world of today, something which is not ‘instant’ is as good as a rock. And above all, we need instant communication. For communication over the internet, we have e-mails and Instant Messengers or IM’s as we call them. Most of the IM’s belong to the line of CSS such as MSN and Yahoo! The developers of these systems do not disclose their source codes. Read More