Blender Foundation - Gooseberry Open Movie Project

2014 and 2015 are going to be great years for Blender! Ton Roosendaal shared some plans - Gooseberry Open Movie Project:

• EU funding of €220,000 per year (with luck for two years).
• The launch of Project Gooseberry, the new Blender Institute open movie (a teaser website is now live).
• A list of projects and tools – many in the content/asset management and collaboration area.
• A list of full time and part time employees – the team is growing!

In the past 6 months, I’ve only had time for a handful of tiny commits to the Blender code. As much as I love coding and work on Blender itself, I’m also quite useful for other tasks – especially to help the Blender project to grow, become more professional and to get more developers on board.
Blender has grown as a community and volunteering project very well in the past decade, but the current user demands and our ambitions also require that we need more full-time developers on board. The past Open Movies have helped with that, and last year the Development Fund and gifts from sponsors allowed us to hire more people as well.

Details:

Blender Institute

Blender Institute is internationally well known for pioneering using Open Content production as a development model for Open and Free Software. Since 2005, five projects have been realised this way, including the short films Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, Sintel and Tears of Steel. For each project the technical targets were defined first, which became the main lead for a challenging cre- ative concept for a mixed artist/developer team to realize with Blender and other Open Source tools.
The success of this model has led to much im- proved software and a more professional user/ coder community. Productions of short film with Blender are common now.

 

Project Gooseberry

The Blender Institute’s 6th ‘Open Project’ has been defined to tackle a next challenge in complexity: to realize a full feature animation film, in- volving a network of 8-10 small studios worldwide (50-80 people in total). This has been nicked “Project Gooseberry”.

Technology for cooperation

Turn-key setup of a large virtual company for tem- porarily collaborative projects by small studios.

• Content and Asset Management
• Project Management tools
• Deploy Open Source Cloud technology
• Efficient (video) communication channels
• Sharing of internal CPU and GPU computing

 

Creative Technology

Improve and validate Blender and popular open source tools (GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice) within collaborative studio environments.

• Multi-threaded animation systems
• Hair and Cloth simulation
• Get things done with open source Audio tools
• Versioning and History

 

Creative Data

• Movie & all production data under Creative Commons
• Full statistics on usability and daily workflow for the entire project.
• Tutorials, learning paths, documentation. and rendering resources

One director – One story, told by many teams in their own styles

Project Gooseberry is a real “no-budget” indie film.
Blender Institute thinks it is feasible to produce in the range of a 2-3M euro budget. This can be raised online and via subsidies and sponsoring.
We then can go all the way as a real “open movie”, with a lot of freedom and realize it as “our own film” for real - also because the low budget requires everyone to invest in it a lot.
What we can do:

• Bring together all the teams with each their own input, their own style and competences, and co-develop the film
• Let’s make something we like to make ourselves and like to share
• Get it done, in time and within budget!
• Let us discover our own way of film making and story telling
• Develop an infrastructure for an efficient production process with Blender and other open source software

Vision

Don’t grow, cooperate!
Future economic and business models will be based on co-operation, not on growth. Larger organizations will benefit from geographic de-centralization. Smaller organizations will form ad-hoc co-operation projects to conduct larger scale projects together.

Subsidies

The EU supports our project to develop an "Open Production Environment". Subsidy requests for E-culture support and local Film Funds are being prepared.

 

Technology Partners

We welcome (internet) technology partners to co-develop and validate an open source infrastructure for SME projects like this. There's also industry interest in OpenCL and GPU technology, High Frame Rate, 4K, stereo (3D), etc.

 

Crowd Funding

We are aware that the crowd-funding effect is wearing off... the benefits for supporting a film project are not always very clear - and certainly not if you only get a dvd or bluray after 2 years. Nevertheless, we expect to get substantial contributions from the Blender community and other people with an interest in our work. Focus will be on two main offers:
Getting your film credit
People who donate an amount sufficient to get a credit, could get a physical product as well (like a data card).
Monthly Blender Cloud subscription
We'll put everything from all previous open movies and our training DVDs "in the cloud". This will be the main sharing platform for art and 3d goodies we make during the project, including the final release of everything.

 

Shares

Each of the Gooseberry studios will get a percentage of the exploitation profits. We will also "sell" the rights on such percentages to sponsors or big donors.

 

Exploitation

The planning is to have halfway the project a Pilot ready, a short representative edit of the film to show to parties who exploit licensed media content.
The "exploitation window" should be kept as short as possible. Current goal is to make it three months, but 6 months is acceptable as maximum. After the "exploitation window" we will open the gates of our cloud and share everything!

 

Sponsor prospectus

We are working on a well balanced offer to reward partners and sponsors. Contact institute at blender.org to learn more about this.