Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world. More about the project...

Elephants Dream in stereoscopic 3d

  / by Ton

At the October 2010 Blender Conference, Wolfgang Draxinger presented his re-render of ED in stereo 3d. Since then you can find this stereo version film youtube or vimeo, but I kept forgetting to put the links to the full HD downloads here too:

Here are the two versions, side-by-side or vertically aligned.

http://download.blender.org/ED/ed3d_sidebyside-RL-2x1920x1038_24fps.mkv
http://download.blender.org/ED/ed3d_overunder-RL-1998X2x2200_24fps.mkv

Thanks Wolfgang!

-Ton-

Forum opened for feedback / discussions

  / by Ton

Hi all,

There’s now a new forum on blender.org, for discussions or feedback on Elephants Dream and other Open Projects, as organized by the Blender Foundation.
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=20

Thanks!

-Ton-

‘Making Elephants Dream’ at the Blender Conference

  / by Matt

It’s been a long time since this site was updated, part of the natural way of things as we move further and further away and on to other new and interesting things. Recently, the team from the studio (unfortunately minus Basse, who’s flight was cancelled due to a airline strike :( ) got back together in Amsterdam again for the Blender conference. We gave a presentation ‘Making Elephants Dream’, which is available here on Google Video or via BitTorrent. In it we mention a few things, including our version of what the story is about, and also some of the easter eggs and tributes that we hid inside, so if you’re interested, go and check it out!

Of course the rest of the conference was great too, and the tech team have done a great job in recording, editing and presenting these videos in excellent quality. A list of videos of the other sessions, some including us again, is available for Google Video and for BitTorrent, with more videos still on their way.

First European HD DVD released… and it’s Elephants Dream

  / by Matt

The next generation of DVD formats are on their way, and one of them is HD DVD, supporting HD 1920×1080 video, high quality surround sound, and many advanced interactive features. Today, Michael Becker from Skywalk Mastering GmbH / Imagion AG in Germany sent us an email telling us that his company had produced the first ever European HD DVD title: Elephants Dream.

Michael tells us:

I am very happy to let you know that we worked very hard over the last weeks to produce an “Elephants Dream” HD DVD. This is the first(!) ever European HD DVD title and it will introduce the start of the next generation format in Europe. As the whole European PC and movie magazines are waiting for a first HD DVD title in Europe this will be a hugh success for your movie and I am sure this will go through the press worldwide.

Today there are worldwide (USA / Japan) only approx. 40 titles available. The HD DVD format was released in April this year in Japan and might be the new HD disc Format for the future. A European start of the format is planned for approx. October 2006. The process to programm and author an HD DVD is very complex this is why no title has been produced in Europe so far (tools are not ready right now).

Not only that Elephants Dream is the first European HD DVD release it is also (as far as I know) the most complex HD DVD title ever release worldwide and the picture quality is really great. The disc includes most of the new HD DVD functionalities such as “on the fly menus”, Picture in Picture features and some HD / SD comparison functions. We expect that the disc will have cult status very soon and promote the Elephants Dream movie.

HD DVD menus HD DVD menus

The full press release is available here at their Elephants Dream HD DVD microsite. The story has already been covered by German technology news websites heise.de and mediabiz.de.

This is a fantastic surprise, none of our team knew that this was in production, and judging by the making of videos on their website, it looks like they’ve put an enormous amount of work into the project too. Also possible download music of the game with site www.kazeban.biz

The HD DVD is for sale for € 14.90 which covers their production costs. It’s wonderful that people are taking advantage of the Creative Commons license like this, it’s exactly what’s encouraged. This is very positive and benefits all parties, increasing Orange and Blender recognition throughout the industry and providing a great showcase for the talents of the Imagion staff.

Elephants Dream on German TV (now!)

  / by Matt

This is extremely late notice (better late than never), but I just found about about this chatting online. Elephants Dream will be shown on the German TV channel 3sat, apparently right about now, 13 August 2006. Here’s some info about it: http://www.3sat.de/neues.html .

Happy watching!

Creative Commons Remix

  / by Matt

Some re-edited versions of Elephants Dream have started to emerge around the web, taking advantage of the Creative Commons license, which is great to see.

Ilia writes:

My name is Ilia Bis. I am a composer and musician, raised in Moscow and currently based in New York, recording and performing under the name “Tonearm”. You can find my instrumental music at www.myspace.com/tonearminst and my songs at www.myspace.com/itonearm and www.tonearm.net/music.html.

I have been collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists for a while, and, like many people, having been quite impressed with Blender and Elephant’s Dream, wanted to try and juxtapose the visuals from the film with my music. I have written a track for it (about 3 minutes long) and did a rough edit of the film together with a professional film editor, and I think the result is pretty interesting and tasteful, even though it may be different from the original.

‘roschler’ writes:

I made another animated music video using footage remixed from the astonishing Elephants Dream project. This time it’s a parody on “Ma Ya Hi” which is the English version of “Numa Ye”; the song that has been lip synched and parodied so many times before. It’s called “My PC (is on fire)”.

In this parody, Emo’s computer is broken and wants Proog, who is his computer repair man, to fix it. Proog refuses to fix it until Emo pays his last bill. But, Emo won’t pay the last bill until Proog fixes his computer!

It’s called My PC and you can download it here:

http://www.spokenring.com/numa-numa-english.php

Elsewhere, Elephants Dream also appears in screenshots from a video conversion and encoding program: VisualHub.

All these uses and more are perfectly legal, and encouraged! We’d love to see more of what people get up to with the movie and/or production files, so if you know of any other appearances, let us know here, or get to work making something yourself! :)

Original lossless video and audio available

  / by Matt

We have given the folks at Xiph, the developers and custodians of the various Ogg video and audio compression codecs, a lossless copy of the Elephants Dream audio and video, as FLAC files and a PNG sequence, and they are hosting BitTorrent downloads of them on their server.

This will be of great value to people interested in developing, testing or benchmarking video/audio compression software. Unlike a DVD movie, which many video compression benchmarks are based on, the PNG files are losslessly compressed, identical to the pristine original output, in full 1920×1080 HD resolution. It would be great to see Elephants Dream become the new standard source footage for video and audio compression testing!

The files are many, and very large (around 20GB total), so this is not something that you can play back and watch – this won’t really be of interest to most people who just want to see the video. If this describes you, it would be polite to have mercy on Xiph’s servers if you don’t really need the files :) Having said that, it can be fun to have a poke around and see a few of the original HD frames, but you don’t need the entire sequence for that. The files are, like the other versions of the movie, are available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. Thanks to Ralph Giles for helping to set this up.

Note: The BitTorrent version 4 client is required!

640×360 PNG image sequence (BitTorrent)
1920×1080 PNG image sequence (BitTorrent)

Audio tracks (5.1 and stereo) and raw PNG files

Making Of, Commentary and more online

  / by Matt

Yes, if you’ve been reading other news sources, you’ll know this is a bit late, but better late than never! We’ve all been taking a breather and getting on with some other things in the meantime (including Ton organising an awesome ‘‘Open Source Pavilion’ booth for the SIGGRAPH tradeshow, which will feature Elephants Dream).

Anyway, we still need to do a nice big publicity/news roundup, but until then, there are a few new videos from the DVD set online for your viewing pleasure. The making of documentary is now available, along with the commentary tracks. Watching these may not only give you an insight into what went on during the project, but also give you a picture of what we thought is going on in the movie, straight from our own exhausted mouths :) These are available under the CC-Attribution 2.5 license. Thanks Joeri for putting these online!

Update 28 June: We now have downloadable versions of the making of available.
3gp, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV versions (Austria)
MPEG4, 100MB (Netherlands)
MPEG2, 550MB (Netherlands)

Making Of: 31MB Divx 5 (Germany)
Making Of, Part 1: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 2: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 3: Streaming (YouTube)
Making Of, Part 4: Streaming (YouTube)

And the commentary tracks:
Video & Commentary, Bassam and Andy, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Ton and Andy, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Jan, Streaming (YouTube)
Video & Commentary, Ton and Bassam, Streaming (YouTube)

There’s also the voice actor recording videos:
Voice Recording: 6MB Divx 5 (Germany)
Voice Recording: Streaming (YouTube)
Listen to the Sound of the Machine: 2MB Divx 5 (Germany)

Half a million downloads… and the ED Karaoke version!

  / by Ton

Now the real download craze is over we’ve checked some of the statistics. For example, in the two days we offered the movie on blender.org it was downloaded over 53k times. I had to remove the links because our servers were smoking.

I didn’t get all stats yet from the other mirrors, but the confirmed numbers (including torrent) are 533k now. Might be in reality a million though, our download page alone attracted daily over 150k pageviews for almost a week.

Further; Jan Morgenstern has finished the audiotrack without voices, for your karaoke and dubbing pleasure, available under the CC Attribution 2.5 license:

ED-ME-5.1-DVD.ac3 (35 MB)

We’ve already been contacted by an Italian TV production studio interested to do the Italian dubbed version. Just a note; you can just do this without asking permission, fits perfectly in the CC license!

Thanks,

-Ton-


Monthly Archives:

© Copyright & sharing info

ok