Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film made entirelyExcept for Reaktor (a modular sound studio) and Mac OS X (the OS of the cluster used to render the final production), all software used was open source. using open source applications and premiered on March 24, 2006 after about 8 months of work. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the way the script was developed.

Overview

The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender was the primary piece of software used in the creation of the film. The project was joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the film's credits. The bulk of processing for rendering this film was donated by the BSU Xseed a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5 based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame [http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3583. When completed, the film was 11 minutes long, or 9 minutes 30 seconds if the credits are excluded.

The film's purpose is primarily to field test, develop and showcase the capabilities of open source software, demonstrating what can be done with such tools in the field of organizing and producing quality content for films.

During the film's development, several new features such as an integrated node-based compositor, hair and fur rendering ^*, rewritten animation system and render pipeline, and many workflow tweaks and upgrades were added into Blender especially for the project.

The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license ^*, so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please (provided attribution is given). The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the film on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.

The film was released for download directly and via BitTorrent on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.

Storyline

Elephants Dream is a story with tightly designed, surrealistic architecture and unusual sound effects. All of the elements in this short film represent the workings of a computer in a surreal fashion. Emo (Cas Jansen) and Proog (Tygo Gernandt) enter a computer (the 'Machine' that he refers to) and travel through it as though it's a mysterious fantasy world. At one point they stop to listen down a phoneline and hear modem noise. Proog constantly warns Emo about taking the machine seriously.

Towards the end they come to a scene that represents the connection to the internet as a many tentacled beast. Emo exclaims "It's not real" as he cannot see it, even though the old man warns him that it does really exist. Proog eventually takes action to protect Emo who cannot see the presence of the many cable-like tentacles of the world wide web.

Cast

Tygo Gernandt - Proog
Cas Jansen - Emo

Crew

Ton Roosendaal - Producer
Bassam Kurdali - Animation director
Andy Goralczyk - Art director
Matt Ebb - Artist
Bastian Salmela - Artist
Lee Salvemini - Artist
Toni Alatalo - Technical director
Jan Morgenstern - Composer
Phil Swain - Marketing Director/Storyboard

Software and tools used

Blender was the main program used in creation of the film. The other software was used for pre/post-productions and management of the files. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution used. KDE and GNOME were the desktop environments used.

Notes

External links

2006 films | Computer-animated films | Open content short films