JohnCalvinYoung.com

At long last, “Big Buck Bunny”, the short-film ani­mated result of the Peach Open Movie Project under the aus­pices of the Blender Foundation, has been released online. The Blender Foundation owns the source code and facil­i­tates devel­op­ment of the open-source CG soft­ware pack­age Blender. The Open Movie projects were designed to get a num­ber of vol­un­teer ani­ma­tors and film­mak­ers together to make a film specif­i­cally to show­case Blender’s capa­bil­i­ties. If the capa­bil­i­ties or fea­tures are not present, they are typ­i­cally devel­oped and added dur­ing the project.

Although the orga­ni­za­tion of the project has been inter­est­ing, the qual­ity of the fin­ished project is the most intrigu­ing point for me. Blender has come a long way–I’ve been using it since 2005, and its capa­bil­i­ties have expanded by leaps and bounds (no pun intended), espe­cially in furs and par­ti­cles, which are show­cased in this film. This soft­ware has opened oppor­tu­ni­ties for many young ani­ma­tors who could not oth­er­wise have made the step into professional-level ani­ma­tion. Some projects are even specif­i­cally using Blender for scal­a­bil­ity, as it is freely avail­able, such as The Filthy Spoon Project, mod­eled and designed entirely in Blender.

P.S.–The entire pro­duc­tion files are also avail­able, as well as DVDs for sale on the site. In the spirit of open-source soft­ware, though, the film is down­load­able in up to 1080p res­o­lu­tion for free.

In other notes, the com­poser for the film, Jan Morgenstern, has released the whole score as a freely down­load­able album.
Very inter­est­ing for those who might be scor­ing other short films. A full fea­ture score is very inter­est­ing, but scor­ing a short film (like shoot­ing one) is a rather dif­fer­ent art.

Very, very inter­est­ing project. And I believe it was done with 7 lead ani­ma­tors. I think a project like this could very eas­ily be done by one or another of the online groups, like CF.org for example.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young