Category Archives: Production

Monday morning kick-off

by - 2012/03/19 3 Comments Production

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:

  • Ian will work on moving storyboard edit
  • Everyone continues design work (robots, dome, props)
  • Target: friday basic models – also character stand-ins – ready for 3d animatic work next week
  • Ton/Rob and Ian will finish breakdown work (all scenes and shots numbered and quantified)
  • Sebastian finishes the tracking training dvd this week, Francesco assists on dvd design and html work.
  • Everyone does a blog post, of course!

Image: a tree across the institute already has leaves. It’s spring soon!!!

Weekly – March 16

by - 2012/03/18 5 Comments Production



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)

Team complete!

by - 2012/03/14 17 Comments Production

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).

Quit Blender! Source files and HD version

by - 2012/03/13 24 Comments Production

As promised we release a final version of the kickoff workshop short film in full HD for your delight, containing a few fixes and tweaks. We are also releasing the main production folder under CC-BY license for you to explore and improve.

Here we have an outline of the quit_blender_files folder:

  • chars – the library files for the tentacle robot and the dones
  • footage – a readme.txt file, which will invite you to copy in there the content of the quit_blender_footage folder
  • scenes – all the VFX shots in the short film, shot_XX_compositing usually is the final version of the file, linking in all the libraries and effects
  • sets – basics sets used for tracking support, masking and compositing

Since a lot of renaming and refactoring has been done, it is possible that some paths might still be broken. Make sure you are using a recent (trunk or 2.62 should also work) release version of Blender.

Last but not least enjoy the full HD version of “Quit Blender”!

Open or closed: we’re open! :)

by - 2012/03/12 24 Comments Directing & writing, Production

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-

Meeting with the costume designer

by - 2012/03/12 12 Comments Artwork, Production


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!

Lazy sunday in Amsterdam (and some research)

by - 2012/03/11 17 Comments Production, Random

Today we did a little tour to the Oude Kerk here in Amsterdam and enjoyed the first sun of spring. Blogging in the sun while hanging around in the beanbag in the Blender Institute is also quite pleasant, I can tell you!

Anyway, the light in the church is beautiful! We have to find a way to put this in the movie while at the same time have it destroyed by robots. Also the trees and bicycles in front of the church and around the redlight district might become a masking nightmare too. Or we just cover them with futuristic tech-stuff. But let’s see what happens.



I couldn’t help but film and track something in the church. But I have other things to do than putting something in it, so if you guys are interested in some compositing fun, here’s the track and footage. Do something cool and link here! :)

https://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/libmv/sebastian/kerktrack.zip

First week kick-off, behind the scenes

by - 2012/03/10 15 Comments Production

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! :)

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