Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Here are some additionnal artwork done last 2 days around this first minute of the new script with few anecdotes about, as my period ending very soon in 2 weeks, I try to give my maximum and do as much of speedpainting I can. As time is missing with the last script revision, I will not do storyboard and try to finish the concept art, spend time with Soenke and Angela too on the process of 2D to 3D conversion.

-David

• the Shaman with 4 arms:

I design him this way to break the usual “indian master” shamanic cliché. I very like the spider 4 arms slow movements and gesture. Ideal to get a talking scene visually less boring. I really personnaly like this design.

Most part of the team is enthusiast or just ok with , but Colin don’t feel comfortable with the idea that human can have 4 arms in our fantasy world. This concept change his vision about the storytelling of the scene too.  So this Shaman concept will surely evolve in a different way,  on Monday we’ve got a meeting about the fantasy level of our world as we don’t have any general concept information about characters, environnement or the civilisation in the script work of Esther Wouda. So, we will invent it to give more background to our fantasy world.

We will study too the fun idea of Ton to build the design of our Shaman around our lovely smyling server at the Thaï restaurant.

• the 4 gatekeepers :

Half warrior / half religious,  our gatekeepers are a band of 3 guys plus a strong master.

Ton wanted to name them with 4 names of French presidents , but I was against. So, we found them some code name : “Jack” for the master cause he looked at first as the comedian Jack Black,  Smith for the second ( Agent Smith of Matrix ) , after we got a classical dark assassin, and our philosopher “LaoTseu”. Of course, they appear not long enough to develop their character too much , but our fun code name help to talk about the fighting organisation and they are far easier to remember than 4 name of French presidents ! Lee is already working on the “crappymattic” of the scene with Colin.

• Speedpainting 2D previzualisation :

This not a shot of the movie, but more an inspirationnal shot to give an idea to the team of the amount of snow / fog / and how it interact with color.

For the moment , I do this exercice with all the key scene of the movie. Behind “Jack” , you can see a fat man ( just a blury head)  ; he was the “fat guardian” concept art. We removed him from the band , cause too hard to kick fast for our Sintel.

Alrighty!

Since before the Blender Conference we’ve been working to improve and condense the script– and we’ve ended up restructuring the film somewhat.  So the first minute has changed dramatically!

Here I give you the script and temporary breakdown for the new First Minute of “Sintel.”

We’re gonna do a few tweaks and polishes today, and then the script will be locked!

–Colin

Edit: Here’s a PDF version of the breakdown, for those who requested it.

Hello!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Yesterday was the last day of the Blender Conference and we’re all still recovering!

But we haven’t forgotten about you. We have a number of posts coming up to go over some of the stuff we showed off at the Durian talk on Sunday.

But first things first. For those of you who missed the live stream, we revealed a lot about the movie–including the (working) title!

Photos by Dolf Veenvliet

BAM! Congrats to “D” for guessing the title right. You deserve a prize! Perhaps a free DVD?

And we also revealed the final character design for our main character– whose name, coincidentally, is Sintel as well!

Click to Enlarge

BAM! Done by the amazing David Revoy of course.

Here’s the video I slapped together to kick off the talk:

Blender Conference Intro Video from Project Durian on Vimeo.

And here’s a quick video to introduce the work we’ve done on the first minute of the film! It’s rough, but hopefully gives you a glimpse of some of the stuff we’ve been doing. All of this material has already been cut– but we feel this has been an excellent exercise.

Durian First Minute – 01 from Project Durian on Vimeo.

Also check out the PDF of this sequence in first draft of the script!

Expect more updates from us soon.

–Colin