Is the Open Movie Dead?

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There have been other shorts and features made with Blender, but I don’t think anyone else really does “open shorts” or “open features” - or at least I don’t think anyone else calls them that. You might have better luck finding “creative commons” shorts made with Blender, but they likely aren’t releasing the assets they made for their movies if you consider that a requisite part of “open”. Indie works tend to predominantly be shorts in my experience. Finding a creative commons feature seems significantly less likely.

For Blender Studio, “open movies” are valuable marketing tools for the Blender software. They’re also useful for stress testing the software and ensuring the dev side understands what production needs from the software. For end users, they’re useful for learning from.

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Absolutely agree on those points. Thanks for the input.

I can clarify about the Blender Studio Movies. I absolutely see the value as you say and even support them monthly.

To define the “Open Movie” as I had understood it to be in the past, it was more like an Open Source movie. Meaning that it encouraged and even facilitated community contribution. Sintel is the last one I remember that had someone in charge of vetting and organizing community-made assets. Then of course, as it still is the case now, you could pay some money and get more access to assets made by the studio.

So what I am referring to as the Open Movie being dead, is first, not that there is no value in the Blender Studio open movies. There clearly is. But most of that value is not dependent on them being open. They could make movies, then use that process to test and build the software. That is in fact one of the unique aspects of Blender development. And one of the strongest points. Blender users find it easy and sensible to contribute to something tangible, you get access to all kinds of content and training etc. Again, this could be done under any kind of license. That it is an open license with very little restriction simplifies and even makes that just a bit more attractive. I am not saying this is bad. And I am not saying there should be a better way. I am just stating that the Open aspect of it is not that much of a contributing factor overall. Outside of a selling point for contributors interested in Open Source. And there is nothing wrong with that at all.

Second, what I am saying is that, because the Blender Foundation managed to form the Institute and get it funded, which then became Blender Studio, many users completely discounted that reality, and the fact that these movies were closely supervised by competent people with experience, and leaped off on some kind of faith-based process wherein if it was “Open” and the software was free, there would be hordes of Blender users just waiting to jump in and make a community movie.

I have seen a few projects over the years, some more organized. Many many simply not and only riding on a wing and a prayer.

However I always thought that if the Blender Foundation could organize this, so could another entity with funding, with competent producers, a writer and a director with some experience with a core team of artists.

But when I ask about this possibility, and the possibility that there could also be well-organized internships and contribution etc. And done in the spirit of a very controlled but community based activity, all I hear is crickets.

For that reason, I assume the concept of the Open Movie as I have known it, is dead.

So if I had a rich uncle who was thinking about sending some funding my way. As an experiment. I would just have to tell him. No. The idea is dead and no one is interested. Though it was a nice thought.

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Great topic since I love the idea of open movies in general + would love to be part of one some day when my skills match the requirements.

At the moment, the YouTuber “Blender Bob” is doing a open movie with Blender called “Tiki”. If not done yet, you may want to look that up :slight_smile: The topic doesn’t seem to be dead.

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I may have been unclear. I was explaining why the “open movie” concept would have value to Blender to create, but not necessarily other entities. I didn’t get the impression you were attacking the value of open movies - far from it.

But an “open movie” as a community project? Yeah, you’re probably right about that being dead. Logistically, it would be difficult to pull off, especially with larger projects. I’d imagine that vetting and organizing community-made assets ultimately ended up being more work for Blender than having a dedicated team of professionals who were united in a clearly defined creative vision including quality and technical requirements who could do things right the first time.

When sourcing assets from multiple sources, they may not always work together. They may look like they were made by different artists, which makes the project look amateurish. The more skilled the people leading the creative endeavor are, the more they’re going to want the final output to look professional, and the more likely they’re going to conclude it’s easier to pay for that quality than to host a community project for the sake of hosting a community project. The less skilled they are, the less anyone is going to feel motivated to make content for it, and the less capable they’d be of leading the community to a completed end product anyway. Plus, I think most people, especially skilled people, aren’t looking to be volunteers in someone else’s passion project either.

Besides, there are so many options for both paid and free assets out there now, it’s probably easier to search for and grab assets that fit your needs, than to organize and lead a community effort hoping that volunteers will provide the assets you’re looking for.

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Noted. Thanks!

Other good points too!

I was envisioning more of an apprenticeship. We already do that here with a local university. It is an 8 month program. And not just anyone can join. It is a vetted process.

There is no way I would want a total free for all. That said, I do think there is a value to the right people - not professionals - at the right point in their development as artists where a project-based learning is invaluable. I have seen this time and time again with students.

And the main issue with any open project I have ever seen, where community involvement is asked for, it is all about contributing to the project rather than the project organizers contributing back directly to the contributors in the way of professional training and guidance.

I don’t see the Blender Studio thinking this is a service worth perusing. At least not one on one. It is time consuming.

So back to the issue of a) funding to facilitate this, and that b) most of these “Open Movie dreamers” don’t know what they are even doing. How could they give anything meaningful back? I think it is out of whack. They just want to ride of the work of a pack of wanna be-creators.

Regards assets in particular. That is another huge issue worthy of another discussion. To use marketplace assets or bespoke. Or both, how and why, when and where. It is not just a one size fits all answer. And so I don’t think it alone removes the value of people learning, creating, and contributing bespoke assets.

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Thanks for the tip and the feedback!

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I could find a wikipedia page, proving that some were not made by Blender Foundation.

Last referenced one is from 2016.
That shows that interest for this form of movies is low.
And if people making more of them have been more successful at creating more, they are not at promoting them.

I think that philosophy behind that goes against the traditional way to finance and distribute a movie.
That is difficult to collect millions through crowd-funding with a deliberate rejection of the idea of IP.
Object of such crowd-funding is a donation, not an investment.
It is difficult to interest distributors with a deliberate rejection of the idea of limited rights.
If movie is downloadable online to anybody, why a movie platform would finance it ?
Why theaters would expect entries by projecting it ?

Financing of such movies can only be build on other interests.
Interest for open software, open hardware used to create them.
Interest for object itself ( film genre, subject of movie, length of movie).
Interest for movie makers that have to be well-known and supported by a huge community.

Independent movie are a niche. And open movies can only be a niche inside that niche.
If you don’t finance them to be done by professional, they are still technically complicated to be made and technically complicated to publish, distribute for hobbyists.
It is easy to upload a video to youtube, vimeo.
That is more technical to install a server to share sources.
If you are already competent to create a peertube, mastodont instance, you are rarely inclined to promote your movie on massively used social networks.

And now, that machines and internet are more powerful, and animation software easier to use.
Most of young people, wiling to share a vision or a story or an artistic style, want to create a game rather than a movie.
In our current world, a game is a more desired object than a movie.

It would probably be easier for open movies to be financed if they try to be associated to ecosystem of other open creations.
Open-source video games have potential to lead promotion of any other open art form.

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Thanks for all of those thoughts!

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Yeah, that’s kind of along the lines of what I was thinking: that what you’re describing almost sounds more like an organized student project like you see as part of an educational program such as univerities, particularly if education and artistic development are the goals.

An organized entity that isn’t related to education would have less motivation to host an opportunity for the sake of education. They’re most likely to develop the work internally, and either hire out or recruit for additional work beyond their regular team.

An individual or random non-organized group of individuals could want to pursue such a project as a learning and artistic development opportunity - although more often they’re probably looking for volunteers to help complete their passion project - but would likely lack the organizational, technical, and/or artistic experience to pull it off.

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I make an assumption, because nobody mentioned something like this. From what I understand open movies of Blender Foundation had many purposes, rather than having only one goal.

Say it was like, stress-testing and benchmarking the software, putting it under pressure and improving it in various areas. This way funds could be secured, and many other features could be introduced, each movie brought various features ( eg: Tears Of Steel brought motion tracking, Sintel brought other features, etc).

If we talk about open movies here, we can only consider the aspect of classic film making. To turn a story into a 3D CG movie as such.

This is correct, in terms of having a development team and such, having many members is a huge help and not only in development terms, but also figuring out use cases, improving features, bug testing and such.
__ Another very important thing to note, is that in terms of the development process, things are very simple and streamlined. The most critical part of the software development is to have a minimum viable product at any given moment in time and then continuously keep incrementing the features and scope of the (see agile development).
__ Say for example you get PersonA who creates an awesome PDF document with the best sales pitch you have ever seen, and PersonB creates a cube that throws bullets (atari-style) and writes in a text document a road map for the next 20 features. In terms of pragmatism PersonB wins, not because he is great (PersonA has the best PDF), but because PersonB follows the “completionist” mindset. You need a solid plan and steady daily progress to achieve something long-term.

Going by my previous answer above. Other open source games (or other commercially released games that are moddable) indeed “have no release schedule” in that regard. Also any volunteer participation is not exactly based on some point-A-to-point-B mindset (goal driven) but is rather something like a hobby or a recreational activity. Also most likely is that there is no central authority to guide everyone, more or less each participator picks up from where the previous left and continues.
__ The great problem of indie “open movies” is that they are all “goal driven” (have specs and requirements to meet), they run on an unfair schedule (eg: 4 years deadline and then the end), they rely on central roles (eg: either the leaders do this or that deciding the fate of things), either participators come and go (cause stalling the overall progress).
__ As we can see there are great conflicting standpoints. One is the monolithic 100-year-old movie making pipeline (Waterfall Process). And the other is the new and modern approach (Agile Process). And these two are the opposite of the other and have no common ground.
__ Is not accident that the nature of software is a natural fit for agile, while the production pipeline and following the release schedule is best for waterfall.

Perhaps there is a case to join these two together, as done in Machinima-Style movies. But for traditional rendered movies I see that it can’t fly.

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Interesting points.

Something to note about film production, actually how it really works; that is to say, the animation productions I am aware of and also have done myself, is that it is not really linear (waterfall). Not exactly anyway.

What I have seen is people with little or no experience producing animated films making the assumption that it is purely a linear process. Meaning you start out with the script and hire the crew, do the concepts and then march through the film from start to finish. It definitely can not happen this way with animation. In fact this very over-simplified version is usually only an idea perpetuated by armatures.

Real-world filmmaking has more real-world restrictions. And here, yes, you have to keep a schedule because mainly actors and main crew have other jobs and life to go to. They get older, kids grow up. Locations burn down or change owners, or someone comes along an re-arranges everything. Women get pregnant. On and on. A real film must follow a rigid schedule or it is dead in the water. And if you do waver - as I have done - you can not do this very long. There is a sort of window of opportunity here. And you have to go for it to finish.

Also aside from Special fx previz and eventual compositing. Real world filmmaking is not built from proxi models up to the final render in stages. It is shot all at once right there. And if you build a set, where do you store it to come back to a year later?

Animation on the other hand, is very much like a progressive process where you have to run through the whole process from beginning to end several times. Or at least you should. And if you don’t you will run into trouble.

This is more akin you an Agile process where it is improved over time. And so it actually would invite the idea of multiple collaborators over time. What it must have is someone who understands the value of getting through the entire film as an animatic first from storyboards, (with VO!) very important to start the VO scratch at least at this point. Then previz with proxy models etc. Then animation blocking and so on.

What happens instead is a grandiose ideas of say a feature film, followed by gathering up modelers and sets and characters. Yet no one has even seen if the script and the animatic timing even works. No voice overs yet. Nothing.

Animation is far too complex to try and do it all the first run through with high quality assets.

Now it might be you had time to create some of these assets waiting for these other things to happen. But it can bite you. It has bitten me. But in the case that I was at the previz stage and I had some higher level assets, of course I used those.

But the point is, I always know I am still at the previz stage. Script and timing have to be signed off on first.

Once that is done, a schedule can be made for assets and animation.

Most people start this process out backwards.

You have to be able to communicate the idea of the film in the simplest way first. Then improve on it gradually.

This is the hardest and most frustrating part when you realize it isn’t working. And that is why you do it this way. You have to first see that it is working or not and make the adjustments with low overhead.

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These are great points, more or less I am on the same page as well.

Only to mention that I am not a professional film maker (yet?), at the current point I am on the learning process, whatever bit of advice I could collect from here and there I collected through tedious hoarding, however it not essentially comes from top-of-the-top film makers, but rather from software development.

In software development there is a catch here, that you can’t underestimate the significance of experimentation and prototyping. However this phase has only one purpose, that is learning. Learning if the ideas roll, how things could be done, if some pitfalls occur. The point is that however once learning is completed the best case scenario would be to scrap away everything and keep only the essential stuff in. The most pragmatic approach is to salvage the best pieces and clean things up and wrap them up into a nice package with a ribbon.

One example, is that the creators of Doom (Romero and Carmack), would have been programming games since they were 10 years old. By the time they reached 20, they would work only 6 months on Doom. We can consider that Doom development could have started 10 years ago, not in terms of the game itself, but in terms of the learning process, the skill building, streamlining the process.

This what I definitely understood now (hard lesson learnt after many failed projects), that the creation process is entirely different from the production. These two must not exist at the same time.

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Definitely is hell on production. I find myself running into this. Not because I don’t know better, but because some things just don’t hit me in the face until production.

So I am left with the dilemma. I know I should not change anything here. It’s too late. Very bad to do this now. Some people on the team will be annoyed.

Against, well, the end result will be so much better. At the point people see this the experience will be so much better. Story makes much more sense. Or the animation sequence cuts together better now.

Oh well.

That’s the point of evaluation. What is the trade off?

Most of the time I will sacrifice the production process over the story.

And so this leads to the next thing which is why you should be using animatic and previz.

And then slowly build up the film in details so you can catch these things at a time when pivoting is less expensive.

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The script is finished. It has been for a while. :slight_smile:

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So, since you guys are interested in the subject, let me explain how it works on Tiki. At the beginning I didn’t know if I could get enough people and I accepted everybody, not matter what their level was. I soon ended up with like 60 people and I was impossible to distribute all the asset by myself. I didn’t know the team. I didn’t know who’s good, who’s not. We already had a bible of the assets so I made a few google sheet (set, props, animals, humans, vfx) and for each assets I noted if it was for junior, mid-level or senior.

Of course everybody who applied to work on the project needed to show their demo reel but that’s not always representative of the reality. I kept the senior guys for the characters. Some of them are incredibly talented.

So people chose what they wanted to work on by just adding their name next to the asset they are working on. I had maybe one or two cases where people chose stuff that were too complicated for them.

I have two junior modellers that gave be really crappy, unacceptable models. So I made personal clips for them to explain everything that wasn’t right and how to fix them. They were both very happy about that and they fixed the models. So for them it’s a learning experience. Speaking of which, I have many people who told me that for them working on Tiki was a huge opportunity for them because they don’t have enough experience/stuff to show to work on such a big production. I don’t think they have many juniors at Pixar, Disney or Dreamworks. They can afford the mid to senior staff.

It didn’t take long that some people, natural leaders, stood out of the crowd. I offered them the supervisor jobs. So one for lookdev, one for characters, one for rigging. I’m supervising the hard surface modeling.

One very important thing: since we are all working for free, I don’t put any pressure on anyone. They all asked me how much time they had to model their stuff because they have a full time job, a family, studies or whatever. And my answer is always: take the time that you need. I had two cases where some people just didn’t deliver anything and after a month, I had to take the model away from them but it turns out they where happy I did so because they just couldn’t do them.

One thing very important is to make a project the right size according to your ressources. We’re not doing Coco or Zootopia where you have hundreds of characters and sets. Tiki is about two guys stuck on an island. There are 11 characters but 9 of them are only in a few scenes. 95% or the movie, two guys. Only a few sets too, most to the time it’s the tropical forrest behind them.

From a technical point of view, Real by FAKE, my employer, is supporting us by giving us a server with 80TB and a file server system. That gives us the opportunity to use the 12Gbit/sec internet connection. This server will also host Kitsu, out file tracking software.

For rendering, I’m waiting for the confirmation, but one render farm company offered to render the entire film fro free. I’ve made some tests with them and it will work perfectly for us.

Money wise, so far I have spent 30$ for an addon That’s it. But of course we will need more to pay the actors, composer, sound FX and final mix. These people don’t care about the Blender Foundation and they won’t work for free. For that, I’m dealing with a few potential sponsors.

The big big big problem that’s coming will be to find great animators. But I believe that once the teaser is out, it will attract more people.

About the open movie concept, I had a few people who think I’m exploiting people to work for free. I didn’t twist anybody’s arm to work on this. People join because they want to participate and they want to be part of it. Not everyone has an opportunity to work on an animated feature film. If I was getting paid and I didn’t pay anyone, that would be a different story. In the introduction video, I mentioned that once the movie is done, all the assets, except for the one we buy like the plants, will be offered for free to the community, including the characters. Some people say that an open movie means that we need to develop part of Blender and give the code to Blender. We’re making a movie here, we’re not programmers. But we will release the geo nodes setups, already started with the bamboo generator. So now I call it a collective movie instead. Haters will hate.

My job as CG supervisor is to find solutions. I always do. I will make that movie and it will be awesome. I’m already amazed by what we have accomplished so far since end of december.

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This
IMHO Getting professional feedback, and providing the possebility to allow to network are the biggest and best “payment” alternatives, you can give for a “work for free” project. For me thats the difference between a good and a bad “we all do it for free” project.
I would also say this is more valuable then producing “stuff to show”

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Everybody, including me, learns a lot of that project. I’ve worked on 5 full CG movies and they were all different challenges. On Tiki, I don’t think anyone ever worked on such a big project. And because we are using Discord to communicate, everybody has access to all the departments and see what’s happening. And now that the characters are moving forward, it’s much more encouraging than just seeing props.

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This is turning into a fascinating thread.

As regards this. In most of my experiance on smaller to medium productions it tends to follow an overlapping schedule. Certainly it almost always does on projects where I have had a role in the production planning side.

So all starts with script or concept of course. Then drawn boards and animatics. The boards can already be used very early on for asset planning and budgeting and calculating time needed. I think boards are vital in the process of production scheduling as well as shaping the project creatively. While this is in process key asset building and setting up, also character rigging etc … can often overlap. All the things you know for sure will be needed.

Then 3D blockouts but normally the structure and timing is well advanced and nailed down in the animatic stages. Animation can often start while rigs and assets are still being worked on and finalised. When I worked on video game cut scene sequences I used to plan out these big overlapping bar charts. Also what complicated things was the availability of people. Especially if it is a satellite project within a bigger project like video cut scenes are. But it’s normally broadly followed this pattern on series and shorter animated projects I have been involved in too. And certianly on the mostly one man band projects I am in right now.

I still think there is nothing better than quick turn around hand drawn boards and visuals and old fashioned animatics. I think it is the most direct way to get something from mind to a tangible visual form others can read and comment on. Suddenly that is when a thing actually is an actual thing and really exists. As opposed ot being just a loose idea.

I personally always thought it is important to step back from any involved technical type of working and especially 3D intensive processes when doing these planning stages. I think it helps clear the mind of clutter and helps in imagining things out more clearly. But others like to block everything out in 3D. So it’s not for everyone. I first learned all this working in traditional 2D animation back at the start of my career. It was amazing seeing how the projects came together. They would essentially be 80 percent creativley finished at animatic stage and all the rest would often feel like the extra polish on top.

This sort of careful use of time and money budgeting was refined over so many years in 2D production. Sadly I think that lot of this hard won wisdom is still lost in many 3D computer productions even today.

Edit: I meant to say video game cut scene sequences. Corrected.

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Yeah interesting thread all around.

Film production, one of my favorite topics.

Great points you made.

We started on a 2D project last year and we had to research and kind of sort out and formulate a production pipeline that makes sense.

And it is not dissimilar to how I approach 3D.

I think the simplest way to think of it is how it hit me one day.

What are we doing? We are telling a story. Just that simple.

So the idea is to always find the easiest and fluent way to tell that story. With the least complications and details. These are not what make the story.

Tell it from start to finish, in a short period of time. Evaluate it to see if it is working. Make changes.

Then add the next level of effort to achieve more detail above that, and repeat.

In my opinion there is no real solid production until you have achieved that first pass.

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In software development they call that “make it work, make it right, make it fast”.
Iterative processes like this an be found in all areas - architecture or engineering for example - and the size threshold for a project where such a process is useful is surprisingly small.

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