Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Both the Sintel score and the Sintel credit song “I move On” have won the Jerry Goldsmith Award at the prestigious International Film Music Festival.

Here’s the announcement on the official web with pictures.

Great milestone for composer Jan Morgenstern and lyrics writer Esther Wouda, for the entire team, for open source movies and Creative Commons, and of course everyone who helped making Sintel possible!

Jan Morgenstern website

-Ton-

As requested by Tim Chen, a Taiwan University researcher who created a great non-linear image revision system with a GIMP prototype:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBL1cVzIQik

the full studio svn database for Sintel has been put online as well. Tim needs this data to investigate how a studio workflow for CG animation film goes in practice, and to check on the feasibility to develop a similar revision system for .blend files. If you check the video, this would certainly provide a revolutionary workflow for teams on films!

For anyone interested to investigate studio workflows in general, our svn is available for download here:

http://download.blender.org/durian/svn/

There’s also an md5 for the files. The .tar files have been created like this:

tar -cvf - ./svnroot/durian | split -a 4 -d -b 256m - /tmp/usb/durian.tar

Files that have been uploaded should be 268435456 bytes each, which exception for the last file which is 153933824 bytes. Total size of the svn data is about 114 GB.
Tips for how to merge it all and untar I found on this page.

-Ton-

Both the Sintel score and the Sintel credit song “I move On” have been nominated for a Jerry Goldsmith Award at the prestigious International Film Music Festival:

http://festival.bsospirit.com/index.php/en/news/100-festival-07/265-vi-premios-jerry-goldsmith-los-nominados

Great milestone for Jan Morgenstern, for the team and of course everyone who helped making Sintel possible! The festival awards will be announced July 22nd. Stay tuned,

-Ton-

Lots of things keep happening all the time with Sintel and the crew! Here’s a list of bullet points with highlights.

• Sintel selected for Siggraph Animation Festival.
  Out of over 1000 submissions, 60 entries were honoured. It’s for our open movie projects a first timer, both ED and BBB didn’t make it…
• Blender Foundation booth at Siggraph tradeshow
  At least Colin, Nathan and me will be there. I hope we can afford to fly in other team members… t.b.a.
  Note we also have a Birds of a Feather event at Siggraph with Sintel presentation.
• New download page
  Pablo re-edited the download section, it also has newly encoded versions based on the downsized 4k 16 bits color files made Mathias Linden (thanks!). You can also find all 40 subtitle languages there now.
• Blu-ray ISO and 4k mkv file available
  Mathias Linden also encoded us these versions, test these here: http://download.blender.org/durian/movies/
• Festival screenings
  I do my best to keep the agenda updated, Sintel remains popular at many festivals world wide!

And personal highlights for crew members:

• Colin Levy has been recruited by Pixar, he has a 1 year contract as “Camera & Staging Resident”
• Beorn Leonard is being flied in to Sydney, he’ll become animator on Happy Feet 2, Dr D studios
• William Reynish has been accepted on the famous Danish Film School as an animation director student.
• Dolf Veenvliet launched a crowd-funding campaign for his future fossils Entoforms.
• Ben Dansie now works for MonkeyStack studio,
• Jean-Sebastien Guillemette realized  CGI for the series www.shedmtl.com
• Lee Salvemeni launched new character training at his CGMasters site
• David Revoy and Angela Guenette created awesome Blender training dvds.
• Pablo Vazquez is hanging out here in Amsterdam, will work on new training dvd too.

And Campbell, Brecht and me are still frantically trying to get Blender more bugfree

Thanks,

-Ton-

Look, we even received a Laurel!

The cinema where Sintel screens has digital 4k projection, I’m working with them getting this formatted right and delivered. Would be a real world premiere then too.

May 19 – June 12, 2011

http://www.siff.net/

After almost 10 days of uploading, the 650 GB of 16 bits TIF files arrived safely at xiph.org. Ralph from Xiph converted these to 16 bits PNG and mentioned it was actually 165 GB less data Both TIF and PNG are available there now.

http://media.xiph.org/sintel/

Hopefully they can manage the bandwidth. Thanks for hosting it xiph.org!

We’re very interested to host and link to brand new superior encoded HD Sintel versions. Post urls here!

Although people have been publishing 4k camera footage in free licenses before, a Creative Commons release of an entire short animation film in original 4k non-lossy files could well be a world premiere!

Sintel in 4k – 4096 x 1744 pixels – has been made possible thanks to the support of the Cinegrid Amsterdam consortium, a group of research labs, new media and art institutes. The Cinegrid project will explore capture, creation, distribution, screening and archiving possibilities of  Ultra High Definition (4k and 8k) content, based on making this technology accessible for a wide audience, such as independent artists, researchers or cultural events.

In the next decade, 4k Digital Cinema will become the new standard for film theaters. The movie industry is adopting this format quickly, but obviously locked up by DRM technology to keep full control over the content delivery pipeline. Blender Foundation therefore is very happy to participate in the Cinegrid project to help realizing an open and accessible 4k production and distribution pipeline as well.

Currently, the film is being distributed to all cinegrid.org partners world-wide for screening, research and demonstration purposes.

The original 4k version (8 and 16 bits per color, tif and png) now is available via the The Xiph.Org Foundation download site too, which is 160 GB of data! We are currently also uploading the 16 bits per color files, 650 GB of data, and which will be finished around 25 February.

Visit media.xiph.org/sintel for the 2k frames, 4k frames, and 5.1 soundtrack downloads.

Watching Sintel in 4k projection is a breathtaking experience, which you really shouldn’t miss when a screening is happening in your area. We will keep you informed about screenings on shows, conferences or festivals. I already know it will be shown at NAB in Las Vegas, and at Colin’s art college in Savannah.

Thanks,

-Ton-