The short CGI film Sintel is almost complete, and should be making an official debut online soon. Here’s the trailer:
The difference between this short film and most others is that it was made entirely with open source and other free software. When finished, it will be released with a Creative Commons license, which means that people will be allowed to legally download, share, and screen the film.
The group behind Sintel is called The Blender Foundation, which is also working on the project to improve and display their 3D graphics program Blender. They have two other short films to their name: Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny, both of which were created and released in the same way.
Blender is free open source software, which means it is both free to download and use, but the source codes are free to download and manipulate as desired. For the Open Source geeks, here’s a list of software Sintel is using:
For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot. Next to these, we’ll explore the very promising paint programs MyPaint and Krita. Render output will be in OpenEXR. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Linux, distro and desktop environment is to be defined later. We intend to build our own render farm this time, for which a free software solution will be required as well.
Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.
Open source is becoming more and more popular in mainstream computing. Chances are good that you have Firefox, Google Chrome, or OpenOffice on your home and/or work computer, and all are great examples of good open source software competing against commercial software. Blender is another example (it’s already been used in the creation of films like Spider-Man 2 and The Secret of Kells), but by creating these films they are trying to better their craft and their product.
In addition to the YouTube clip of the trailer, the Sintel site will allow you to download the trailer in various formats and sizes — from small sizes for a mobile device up to 1920x1080p video. If you’re really up for a challenge, you can download the whole thing uncompressed if you have a spare 40 gigs or more.
If you’d like to download one of their other short films, I recommend starting with Big Buck Bunny. It feels like Pixar-meets-Looney Tunes, and it looks gorgeous at high resolutions. Again, if you’re a glutton for punishment, there are about 400 gigs of uncompressed data with play with on their website.
