Everyone’s busy, no blog posts is always good news (unfortunately for you guys out there!). The team spirit is awesome amazing, very inspiring, it tops any project before! It’s probably a bit thanks to the kick-off workshop, but also because we have an amazing talented and well fitting team together.
Every end of friday 18h we do weeklies – artists/devs show their work. These weeklies we try to be constructive and cheerfully positive. That way everyone can enjoy a friday drinks/dinner together and weekend without too much stress as well. Every monday at 10h we do the kick-off meeting. Then the new targets for the week are being discussed, and some asses get kicked – when needed. For Durian this practice did quite well, so I’m testing it with the team here if it works :)
Notes from today’s kick-0ff:
Image: a tree across the institute already has leaves. It’s spring soon!!!
Every friday at 18h we’ll drop our work and gather together to do a short presentation of work. We always have a couple of guests then as well. This friday we had Tony Mullen here, the girlfriends of Sebastian and Jeremy, and Filmmore VFX supervisor Willem Zwarthoed. Willem worked for me 11 years ago (with Bart!) on the website and for Blender support. Since his film academy graduation he works for Filmmore, mostly using Maya and Nuke. Willem shows us some cool Amsterdam vfx work he did for “Sint”. Check the docu here.
Every artist then showed his work and progress of last week; which is mostly doing tests and designs – also to get ready for animatic work. I’ve copied a random selection of graphics just for your fun. Most of this had been discussed here already, or will be next week!
(If you like to attend a weekly, just mail me to make an appointment. We prefer to limit to a just few guests each time, we cannot handle masses here! ton at blender.org)
We didn’t forget what Mango is really about; which is of course to help improving Blender!
Last Monday we had two meetings with the devs & artists, on cycles and general issues. Yesterday we discussed pipeline designs. This morning we worked out a design idea for curve editing for masks. Time for an update :)
And, here’s the Mango Open Movie team in two versions, all of them still looking like fresh young happy people! From left to right: Nicolo, Ian, Sergey, Kjartan, Jeremy, Francesco, Sebastian. (Brecht is working from home still this month).
This morning’s kick-off meeting we agreed on following the OPEN strategy:
– We’ll open everything, except for the last minute.
– But we do not publish the script at all.
This is easier than trying to check each time if we spoil secrets… or being forced to categorize posts. This strategy allows us to discuss a lot of issues openly for our followers, but still keep the ending hidden – AND let everyone guess the story :)
-Ton-
Ian spent today a couple of hours with Pablo Londono Serria. His ideas and designs for clothing are awesome – we really like the proposals and direction it will take. Pablo admitted he had two big desires in his life; getting his own fashion brand, and do a post-apocalyptic film once. :)
Pablo will show first clothes Wednesday already!
Tony Mullen wrote:
It’s my last week at the Blender Institute before returning to Tokyo. It also happens to be the start of production on the Blender Institute’s Mango Open Movie project. For the past week, the team has been working on a 5-day project to get their feet wet with working together and with what will become the Mango production pipeline. I’ve basically been keeping out of the way, observing, and taking a little bit of behind-the-scenes video:
For a brand new team doing five days of work it’s very impressive. Add to this the fact that the main Mango project has already been completely storyboarded (in stunning detail) by David Revoy, and I think that Mango is off to an incredibly auspicious start.
(Thanks Tony! Was great having you around here, and see your own short film evolve: http://electrictownmovie.wordpress.com/ That one is going to be awesome too! :)
Yesterday I sat down with Brecht and Sergey to go over the main development topics, checking if we’re still on track and still have the big picture in mind. Because of the current workshop week we didn’t go over issues extensively with the artists, for that we’ll have plenty of time later. Here’s a short summary of what we discussed.
We’ll keep you posted, next week we can do an artists’ version of the above :)
Bought this morning 4×500 watts halogens, and borrowed a huge theatre light from the neighbours. Right now I hear screams coming from the studio, probably they’re filming ;)
