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

Nick C. Sorbin
Staff Writer
Renderosity Magazine
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"For every breath, for every day of living, this is my Thanksgiving."
-Don Henley