Mar. 23, 2006 For Immediate Release Elephants Dream, world premiere of the first 3D 'Open Movie' (Blender Foundation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - The 3D animated short 'Elephants Dream' will premiere at cinema Kethelhuis in Amsterdam on Friday, March 24th. The short is the culmination of Project Orange, an 'open movie' produced by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The project was conceived to help develop and establish the capabilities of the Blender 3D open source tool for the creation of cinema quality animation. The short film is unique in its exclusive use of Open Source tools for animating, texturing, and rendering, as well as the release of the movie and all of the files used in its creation under the open Creative Commons license. The film tells the story of Emo and Proog, two people with different visions on the surreal world in which they live. Viewers are taken on a journey through that world, full of strange mechanical birds, stunning technological vistas and machinery that seems to have a life of its own. 'Elephants Dream' features the voice talents of renowned Dutch movie actors Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen, as well as an original score by German composer Jan Morgenstern. The short brought together the talents of a team of artists from countries as diverse as Syria, Germany, Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands. In addition to the performances of the cast and creative efforts of the lead artists, Elephants Dream has had the assistance of hundreds of individuals across the world who contributed a variety of work such as programming additional functionality for Blender, creating textures used in some of the scenes, and providing international translations for the upcoming DVD release. After the premiere of 'Elephants Dream', the movie and all of the files used in its creation will be published under a 'Creative Commons' license which will allow individuals the world over to learn from, copy, edit, create, and even sell their own animations based on the original data files used to create the movie. The tools used for creating the movie, such as Blender for modeling, animating, rendering and compositing; the 2D paint program GIMP for texture map creation and editing; Python for scripting; and Subversion for studio data version management; are also available for free under open source licenses. The files will be released on two DVDs with the movie in PAL, NTSC and HD formats, a making-of documentary, and all of the studio files. The DVD is expected to ship in the first half of April 2006. Shortly after, the movie and database of source material will be made available for public download as well. Studio Orange team: Director: Bassam Kurdali (Syria /USA), Art Director: Andreas Goralczyk (Germany) Lead Artists: Matt Ebb (Australia), Bastian Salmela (Finland), Lee Salvemini (Australia) Technical Director: Toni Alatalo (Finland) The team will present their work Saturday and Sunday, March 25-26, in The Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, Amsterdam. The movie will be shown daily there between 13.00 and 18.00 for two weeks following the premiere. For more information: http://orange.blender.org http://www.montevideo.nl Contact: Ton Roosendaal Chairman, Blender Foundation Email: ton@blender.org

I really wish I could go to the premiere, but Amsterdam is a long way from San Diego :( I'm totally stoked about it anyway, though!

Is it known if it will have a US release or will it only be in Europe?

I think the only showings were there and in Brazil, but I suppose they'll probably enter it in film festivals elsewhere.  I think that's probably the only way it'll get shown in the US, unless people who buy it decide to broadcast it somehow, online or otherwise.

Anyone around here buy it and want to broadcast?  Please??

Attached Link: http://orange.blender.org/blog/dvds-ready-to-go

Quote - The “official” launch, on our own website, will wait 10 days though, so that’ll be around the 14th of May.

I have received the DVD today, but no time still to open it  :cursing:
Soon, that's a must be seen  :thumbupboth:

Elephants Dream is now available for download! YAY!!!

http://www.elephantsdream.org/

http://orange.blender.org

Yay!! :woot:

obsessively watches the download bar

I saw the movie today (the 1024 version) and I'm very impressed... its amazing!

Congrats on this. It really is spectacular.

The mechanical animations, like the moving walkways, are awesome, as are the views of the machine.  Wow.  Character animation..well, emo especially, is somewhat unnatural, especially at the beginning, but forgiveable--that's one of the hardest things do do right, since people are so familiar with it on such an instinctual level.  All in all one of the best amateur shorts I've seen, I'm looking forward to next years' already!

I am downloading it tonight yayayayayay