The future of open movies?

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Early Sunday, cat woke me, feeling a bit philosophical, my apologies in advance :stuck_out_tongue:

I was getting on the Blender train back when Elephant’s Dream was released, and I’m pretty sure that’s the final straw that made me fall in love with this lovely piece of open source software. Not the movie in itself, although it was wonderfully bizarre and thus right up my alley, but the whole “open movie” concept. I’ve loved it ever since. But…

Is it just me, or is the open movie concept not really used to any level of its potential? All the Blender Foundation movies are really good, but they are never really built upon. People learn from them (I studied the ED rigs for daaays), but there seems to be a lot more that open movies could be used for, nay, SHOULD be used for!

Idea 1: Continuations/spinoffs. Why aren’t there dozens of little Big Buck Bunny movies out there by now? The characters are ripe for shenannigans and all the basic stuff is there, right for the taking. I’d love more ED and Sintel movies, too, but they are more high concept, while BBB is just begging to be the open movie version of Daffy / Donald Duck.

Idea 2: Finish him (it)! An open movie need technically not be “finished” to be released. I love the idea of very small teams, even individuals, making a movie that is complete, but has technical lacks, like crude materials or very basic animations. You can enjoy it as-is like any other budget-pressing movie or show (c’mon, if Dr Who looked like a Hollywood blockbuster, it’d lose its charm, we know that), but someone else could take the whole thing and insert some of the ‘missing’ pieces, making it much better. Finishing it might not even be a thing anymore, since anyone might come along at any time with some ideas for technical improvements!

Idea 3: Release The Anybody Cut. I think this was on Ton’s mind even back in the ED days, from what interviews etc. I caught. Anyone can re-edit an open movie, changing camera angles and cutting. We’ve got director’s cuts of half of all big movies, Justice League is getting a re-cut series or the like soon, and DVD sales almost exist entirely on Extended Editions. Open movies are ripe for this. #ReleaseBigBuckBunnyExtededCut

Idea 4: I’ve mentioned this before, but any level of open movie opens up the option of having anyone become an animator, allowing teams to be made from anyone and everyone, and allowing unknown people to make the leap into professional animation without needing to go through any gatekeepers (employers, financers, etc.). It’s a chaotic approach, but so was Linux and Blender and all other open software at first, and now it’s pushing hard against the status quo of software everywhere!

Just some thoughts. I am trying to reassemble a project hit by COVID-19 with these things in mind, but I can’t be the only one thinking this stuff, can I?

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That is the spirit of open movies.
But I think those ideas were not exploited, until now, because of limitations people may encounter to make a movie.

You know that represents month of works by people, knowing what they are doing, without technical barrier. And that is minimum required without facing showstopper.

Big Buck Bunny was done 12 years, ago, at the end of 2.4x series.
Just after, happened refactor of Blender 2.5x. At that time, to use a BBB character with blender 2.5 ; you could have to recreate hair and scripts of rig. Some motivated people did that.
(Nowadays, if you want to re-use more .blends from BBB with 2.8/2.9, that means redoing whole shading of a movie made for Blender Internal to make it work for EEVEE or Cycles.)
But that was not unique barrier.

Rendertime was not what it is now, with EEVEE and Cycles denoiser, Optix support.
And BBB was rendered using a renderfarm, especially useful for clouds.
When you are talking about playing with shot by changing camera angle, you have to understand that implies to have a renderfarm at disposal to render a cloud in sky or technical skills to workaround such lack.

The closer, your version of Blender is to the one used for Open Movie ; the less amount of work, it is to make a derivative art.
Technically, Glass Half, done using OpenGL render, was probably the easiest Open Movie for that.
But maybe in terms of assets, this cartoon may be less interesting (Style too marked, too simplistic props, …)

Clearly, last 3 open movies (Hero, Spring, Coffee Run) are good candidates to make derivatives with less amount of work and ressources.
And rendertime is no more obstacle it was in the past.
So, I think that people will really take opportunity to do what you described, but with those movies.

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Regarding point 1 - animation is expensive! Yes, even if you’re doing it in Blender, you still need to assemble a crew to create the film, and fund it accordingly. Blender needs every penny they have for development, because that is also very expensive - these people need to be paid, as would a production crew for any kind of official animation.

Point 2 - Releasing ‘unfinished’ projects looks bad on Blender honestly. If people see unfinished and ‘crude’ content with Blender officially slapped on it, it’s going to give a poor account of what Blender is capable of. The Blender open movies serve for two main purposes (As I see it). To further Blenders development - each movie has focused on a specific aspect of blender and built on it. And also to showcase Blender, and to get people, and indeed companies, using it and increasingly, investing in it.

Point 3 - Re cutting existing material wouldn’t make a huge difference. Do any of the movie projects need to be re-cut or extended?

Point 4 - Respectfully, this is an awful idea from a production point of view. If you let everyone and anyone contribute on final production quality work, then you’re going to end up with a final piece which is a complete mess, frankly. Back in the day, when X-Men Origins: Wolverine came out - there was a pre-release version which leaked, which had placeholder CGI (some of it made it into the movie - it’s dreadful). It was absolutely wild to watch, but completely incoherent as a result. You literally had meshes in t-pose moving drifting through scenes, and blocky animations etc…If you had this approach for an open movie, then this is exactly what you’d get, unless someone was there to gatekeep, and filter through what’s submitted. Having an open movie project where the whole community has the chance to contribute - now that’s a potentially better idea. But if the flood gates are open, it would be bad.

Just my thoughts…

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I never said it was meant to be by The Blender Foundation. I was talking about open movies as a concept.

The dated files and conversions were not things I had thought about, though. I see how that would be a problem. But using them should still cut costs far more than in half, if done right.

If noting like this is done, I just feel that the point of open movies has been lost. It doesn’t matter if something is open, if nobody ever makes use of that.

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I think you have to make the distinction between “producing with” assets and “making use of”, assets. Many artists make use of the open movies and learn from them. So the point might not be totally lost there.

Regarding the concept of “producing with”, I am not so sure that idea was ever fully baked in the first place. A lot of things sound good on paper. But they never pan out.

And this is what is wrong with the Open Movie as a concept. No one owns it. Everyone owns it, sort of. It is a bit of a nebulous idea. It might stand on solid ground with the licensing and legal aspects. But when parsed out in the “real world” it runs up against certain realities.

And the main reality that is overlooked, is the simple true fact of what makes people create things. And that is a sense of pride and ownership. Creating an idea and accomplishing something truly unique that you own fully in the creative sense. Not in the legal sense. People don’t create things because “it is legal to do so”. They create things because they have a passion to do something - creatively - of their own.

This is not to say there is no pride and ownership in creating derivative works. There is.

But the cost of working on a production is extremely heavy in creative resources. Just put money aside for a moment. It takes a tremendous amount of impetus to get anything done in animation. Anything at all. Think of it as moving a mountain of earth. You have to have a large machine and a lot of energy to do that.

For a creative project that energy comes from the original idea and the pride in seeing that idea come to life. This can not be discounted. It is a huge factor. And this is completely missing in taking assets from an open movie and turning it into something. It sounds easy on paper. But even with most of the heavy lifting out of the way, there is a ton of work ahead. And you really have to push hard every day to make it happen. There is just not enough incentive to do that with someone else’s creation.

Most artists would rather do 30 seconds of completely original work, than the same effort to create a few minutes with someone else’s work.

Generally speaking independent Open Movies fall apart because there is not enough resources to pull them off. And because of the concept and sound of it on paper it seems like it should just be able to happen. But the main reason it never quite works out is the reason I have given here. Most artists who have the skill to get the work done either want to get paid, or if they are going to do a passion project, they would rather spend time making a very short project, of their own. Rather than join a larger team of volunteers with no certain outcome and not nearly as much personal ownership and pride for that creative idea.

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I don’t have any problem with the current state of Open Movie. They’re tech demos. They get to put the product through its paces and highlight its new features. We get to dream about the endless possibilities that await us. It’s no different than what Nintendo or NVIDIA do when showcasing their new silicon. I’m okay with that.

It’s nice to dream about where Big Buck Bunny’s next adventure might take him, but not everything has to be “a thing.” Know what I mean? No need for “anybody” cuts or anything other extension. It’s okay for it to be self-contained. The Blender Foundation is in the business of making a high quality (free) product. The Open Movies are just guy on the street with his spinning sign trying to draw in new customers. The way that they’re handling it all now is just fine by me.

That said, I think that it MUST be “finished” to be released. If the goal of the Open Movie is for it to serve as a synergistic tech demo for Blender and its new features, it sort of defeats the purpose to not finish. Otherwise, why not just release a series of smaller demo clips?

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I just did follow this discussion about Open Movie and I would like to add the following comments.
Since the Blender Foundation did release the elements of films produced as show cases and also work bench to test functionalities of Blender, I found in these resources the material for teaching 3D, CGI and animation. I have used in most of my classes these resources to show how things got done as technical examples, not as artistic trend or directions… Big Bunny was one of the best references I could have because it motivated and still motivates my students in finding out how the rig was articulated, how the scenes were set up and so on… but not to copy as a whole… I am retired today but I am glad that the teacher that took over my class finds in the Blender repository the same coherent resources of technical examples leading to finish projects, which during a school year cannot be completed to make a finished production. One could consider the open film concept as a musical lead around which orchestration can be written to make a symphony … Nowhere else students can find technical solutions to their creative energy other than the Blender cloud and the repositories. Regarding doing versioning of existing productions, I feel that it creates a false sense of achievement out of all technical and economic considerations because it’s not the visual that is important but the story and in the Open Source Movies released to date, they are very original stories that are very strong and well supported by the graphical and animated work. If one engage in moving things around, then the result may end in a senseless state, visually dysfunctional from the concept / story… But this is my own feeling…

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While I fully understand and respect the views put forth in the thread, I can’t help but hear echoes of how people talked about open source software two to three decades ago. That it was a cool way to experiment and show off ideas, but in the end should never be viewed as comparable to “real” software. And the idea of not continuing the work because of it being great just as it is, I get that, honestly, but where would we be if nobody had carried on Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, Donald Duck, James Bond (edit: And Sherlock Holmes!!! Both BD and RDJ!!), or any of hundreds others? Even non-franchised material has connective tissue. I LOVE the movie Memento, just as I adore Reservoir Dogs, but what if the big studios had just chalked Nolan and Tarantino up to lightning in a bottle and never gone back to that well? What if nobody had paid attention to Lovecraft stories beyond Call of Cthulhu?
Sorry, I know this is getting a bit lofty, but I never feel that great concepts should just be left untouched, to avoid, I don’t know, dragging them down or the like. For every great character or world that gets to live on in legend through the adding of new ideas, there are hundreds of cardboard franchises that just induce nausea. But there is still that one legend, and it would not likely be there if it had just been an isolated experiment…
Just my two copper farthings, of course!

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Deep thoughts!

How would you think taking an Open Movie and turning it into a viable franchise would be done? Lets say a studio like mine. Small boutique studio. We already have a lot of in-house projects to keep us busy. But what would cause a director such as myself to take on producing, say, a Sintel series?

I don’t mean necessarily financially. Or maybe it could be. But do you think there would be a viable market for it in the Blender community? And beyond?

I would say the competition factor would be taken care of by the fact that there are not many people who could pull it off. I know my team could.

How do you see that playing out?

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Cool way to phrase the issue. Off the cuff I instantly thought about crowdfunded or patreon style “micro-Netflix” models, emphasis on micro. This would solve the problem of a good series dying due to funding and rights issues. It would require some kind of QA, but I think production Darwinism could handle that.
Just the immediate thoughts of a sleepy brain

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Seems like a lot of attention is put on the writing and directing of these movies. Second a lot of close attention to the cast and crew. And last but not least, sound and music.

So lets just take Sintel.

So I would say the first things that would be needed in place would be

  • A competent producer
  • A good writer
  • Good director

And all of these above hats would need to have some kind of trust or following in the community based on past work. People would need to know this work would be something.

I don’t think you could based it on the existing assets and work already done. These key hats need to be trusted.

Then new writing needs to happen, new scenes need to have concept art and modeled. Basically everything broken down to the exact prop needed and so on.

From there assuming this was enough to get money, hiring of great artists to continue the legacy could happen. Modelers animators and voice actors. Then of course a sound designer and a composer.

That is if you are talking about a series. I mean something that has to have legs. There would be a considerable amount of new and unique production that would need to happen based on great writing and directing.

So now. I see this as something that needs to happen. From a practical view.

What is your elevator pitch to the key production people that would be needed to start this effort?

Your at the table. You have five minutes. Go!

lol…

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(Isn’t the elevator pitch 30 seconds? Oh well, I have no real sense of time, so here we go!)

Welcome all, glad to see many of the faces here that we’ve talked to via the boards. And I understand we also have some people on video call, I am confident Simon will make sure you feel almost like you were here in person, except for the donuts. We tried getting virtual ones, but alas!

Kidding aside, we’ve been working with a very small team the last two months to prep this project, and we now feel that it’s ready to move to the next stage. So I present to you, Project Pistachio, also known as Sintel 2.0!

A quick recap for you all, this is going to build heavily on the existing Sintel work done by the Blender Foundation. We sadly could not get Colin or Esther back for directing or writing, but we’ve got them both as independent creative consultants, all with respect for their schedules these days. Instead, Terry here and his lovely wife Emma have drawn up script drafts, sans dialog, for either four 20 minute episodes or five 15 minute ones, putting us just shy of feature film length. We’ll be expanding some of the basic story from Sintel 1.0, and especially the dragonlands mythology and the more complex human-dragon relations of the world.

This might sound daunting, but Roy over here has been combing over both the work files provided with Sintel and those from Spring, and updating them for Blender 2.9. Believe you me, this stuff still holds up great. It is being catalogued for expanded use, and the natural landscapes alone mean a third of the locations are nearly premade, some modular expansion expected. Many more can be made through simple tweaking. The city backdrops will be turned into modular pieces that can be reassembled according to concept art that is already half done, thanks to some generosity from our friends at DeviantArt, who offered existing works as starting points. The missing pieces are mainly characters built from the existing rigs and models, and character animation, which the existing files can only provide about half of. Roy is still cataloguing reusable NLA pieces. And needless to say, Jan’s amazing musical score, combined with parts of Torin’s work on Spring, are still wonderful. We hope to add a few pieces based on them, mainly soft remixes, but most music will carry over directly.

So what do we need, you may ask. The modeling is about 90% reuse, but we still need some unique pieces, especially for character clothing and city decorations. But the big issue is characters. We need a lot of character animation, especially facial work. And you may already have noticed from the social before this that a third of you invited are voice actors. Yeah, we need voices, and we need good lipsync. We hope to get a lot of the basic stuff handled by some clever scripting, but expressions, body language, interactions with environments, yeah, that’s going to be the big deal. We expect to have several of you be leads on individual characters. We also have a couple of parkour and martial arts people from local groups to show us how it looks IRL.

So that’s the short version. Lots of good stuff taken from Durian Sintel and from Spring, already being catalogued and turned modular to use for new locations, and some basic updates to utilize 2.9’s tools, especially new materials. But we still need new work on the more tricky character animation, as well as the pretty details in the city and such. And lots of voice acting.

Terry, Emma, Roy and myself are open for questions. Yes, you with the green sweater?

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lol… well maybe it is a slow elevator in a very tall building

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The fact that no one has made a continuation of Elephants dream called Finding Emo is shocking.

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OK, let me rephrase this.

The Elevator/Room Pitch whatever.

I mean the pitch to the people with money. And the people who will produce it. Your pitch is assuming all of that is in place.

To be clear. An elevator pitch is a sales pitch. You are selling someone to invest time and money.

So…

This pitch would not assume any of the other Sintel team members are on board. And there is no producer or director or team even onboard yet. In fact the Elevator pitch would have to work on the origial team even if in a consulting role.

And if I was also being objective about this pitch, I would say…

I am not really interested in your opinion about how many assets are reusable. For me, I see that regardless, there is a lot of work. And I need to know why I am spending time and money on that and where the market is etc. Because we don’t even have a writer yet. And we can’t even know what will be reused. I am thinking the most important thing will be story. And how the series will unfold which will inform assets.

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(the five minutes threw me off, I thought you were using the elevator pitch concept wrong and meant a presentation pitch. Lemme try that one again, then…)

It’s basically movie production as a brand, with plenty of pre-existing materials to cut a good chunk of production time out, and secure recognizable name, style, characters and everything with it. With the way young culture is moving now, the concept of taking part in your media is more powerful than the media itself, and that has already been established for this title. Anyone can technically “take part”, playing with the tools used in the production on their own as if doing fanfic play (fanplay?), even before the production wraps up, since the original source material is available. An actual production team can just do it much better, on a grander scale. Pre-existing materials, pre-existing audience, pre-existing brand, without any restrictions on its use, but still with an actual team making a difference in the scale of impact.

Sorry, a bit clumsy business buzzwordery in there, haven’t done one of these for over a decade, and this was 100% off the top of my head, writing as it came to me!

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Cool, well thanks for playing along. A fun exercise.

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I should also point out that in the world of big studio movies where a lot of CG assets are created for one movie and then there’s a sequel, they often can’t just reuse all those assets to save time. Technology advances, as do audience expectations of realism, and so they often have to either do a major overhaul or even remake everything from scratch.

So say for example that you manage to sell Netflix on the idea of doing a Sintel series. Even if it is still made in Blender, whoever is in charge will have their own ideas for the visual style, costume design, and more. So the fact that 3D models currently exist would mean very little. At most, they would be used to create an animatic.

Now on the independent level you have to ask yourself a hard question. How many good CG shorts do you actually see? There are the ones made by animation students, but I suspect they would rather create all the characters themselves to best fit their personal story.

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These are valid points. I think if there is anything untapped it is the audience. Not the film original assets.

I think the very first, and most important question to ask when investing in a series would be, is there an audience? And if you can answer that with satisfaction, and you have a realistic way to reach that audience, then you have a platform that can receive some attention from the people who could make it happen.

I would say that all of the Blender films thus far would appeal to a large enough audience. Then question is how to reach them, what platform to reach them on, and then who will write the checks?

From there, it would be a question of licensing.

At any rate I don’t think it matters which way you slice it. It has to have a viable way to get made and that requires an audience.

I think the least attractive elements are the existing assets. Those, from a franchise point of view, are the least valuable in my opinion.

If I was selling the idea. I would not be pushing that as the selling point. That is how I see it.

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I may not entirely agree, but you make a lot of good points, as usual. What would your elevator pitch be like?

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