/ by Ton
After months of silent work behind the scenes, I’m very proud to announce the following:
The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint.
Open Movie
Not only will the project be realized with Open Source/Free Software, but also the resulting movie – including all the production files and software – will be published under an open public license. This makes it an exciting premiere as first ever “Open Movie” project! The movie will be rendered on film resolution, will become available on DVD and is targeted to be transfered to film for theatres.
Studio
We will establish a temporal animation studio, in the Media Art Instute in Amsterdam, based on a core team consisting of artists as well as at least one software developer. The studio will offer positions to people based on fixed targets, which they possibly can execute in shorter periods as well. Next to this core team, contributions will be organized for volunteers to execute externally (working from own area of residence).
Production
The production will be executed during the period September 2005 – March 2006, for a maximum duration of six months. Budget and resources have been allocated for a six person workshop during the entire period. The team will be supported by the Producers’ staff – like PR and production management – and external facilities like for Scripting, Rendering, Music, Voices, Audio Effects and Editing.
In my role as Executive Producer for the movie short, I have approached Bassam Kurdali to become Animation Director, and Andreas Goralczyk to become Art Director. I’m very happy both have agreed to join! Together we now work on the creative concept and will decide on completing the team.
Call for participation
In order to make this project – code named ‘Orange’ – to be become a huge success, we will need the support and contributions of many people.
At this moment the core team has been established. With them we’ll work during 5 days in Amsterdam on pre-production issues, the concept and scenario and methods how to involve collaboration online.
After that date a public campaign will be launched to part-finance this project with pre-sale of the Extended Edition DVD.
Additional information and contact details can be found on the pages of the website here.
Prof. Mark Alan Matties, Department of Computer Science at Bowie State University and Director of the BSU Xseed xseed.bowiestate.edu, has offered the BSU Xseed as a rendering farm for the entire period of the Orange Open Movie project. The BSU Xseed harnesses 224 Apple Xserve G5 – each with dual 2.0 GHz CPUs and 2GB RAM. The cluster has been built recently, and its area of interest is targeting movie production. 
