Open Movie Project

Last week the Blender Foundation has launched the fundraising campaign for Project Gooseberry, the next Open Movie Project. But unlike the previous Open Movies this will not just be a shortfilm, produced in the Blender Institute, this is going to be full feature film, with12 studios around the world working on it.

Pipeline Tools

Of course a project of this size requires tools for pipeline management and online collaboration. That’s why the Blender Foundation decided to not only improve Blender but also work on the following things:

  • Content and Asset Management
  • Project Management tools
  • Deploy Open Source Cloud technology
  • Efficient (video) communication channels
  • Sharing of internal CPU and GPU computing

For studios and freelancers around the world these would be incredible useful tools, allowing much better workflows and improving working in a team.

Blender

But also Blender will improve dramatically. Even though the feature set and quality of the software is already remarkable, there is still a lot of areas that have to be improved. Since Gooseberry will be mainly a 3D animation movie it’s time to finally tackle Blender’s dependency graph and also develop a fully multithreaded animation system.
And to render out all the cute and fluffy animals the hair simulations will be improved, as well as other simulation tools in Blender. Of course all that will have to be rendered somehow, so the Cycles render engine and the compositor will be worked on too.

gooseberry

Benefits

We think Gooseberry is an extremely exciting project.
Especially because everything will be open and free .
That’s an important aspect in today’s industry. If you look at what Autodesk has done to Softimage, and what is happening around the globe to big VFX houses, which have to close their doors, it is important to not only have an independent 3D application that really belongs to YOU, the user, but also to establish a remote CG pipeline, so that teams and freelancers around the world can work together on bigger projects without the need to have huge facilities with hundreds of thousands of dollars for licensing costs.

Support

Of course such a project costs some money. To be more specific, it costs about 3.5 million Euros. Doing it entirely via crowdfunding would not be feasible, so the Blender Foundation managed to get government funding sponsoring. But still, 500.000€ have to be raised by the community to make Project Gooseberry possible.
Being Blender users ourselves we really want to emphasize how important it is to make this project a success.
If you are benefitting from Blender in any way, please think about a donation.
That can be a 20€ donation, which would give you early access to the film, or 175€, for which you would have your name in the film credits, or even more. It is not exactly cheap. But think about what you might pay for commercial software… ;)

The Blender Cloud

The other way to contribute and support the film is to subscribe to the Blender Cloud. For 45€ for 3 months and then 10€ each following month you will get access to all the training material ever produced by the Blender Foundation, to all the assets of every Open Movie including the work in progress of Project Gooseberry. The content is still being uploaded, so you won’t find everything there right now, but they are working on it.

Trailer!

And here’s the trailer!

Please support Project Gooseberry!