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Elephants Dream

World’s first open short movie

Project created: 2006

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Made entirely with open source graphics software. All production files released freely under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange open movie project studio in Amsterdam from 2005-2006. It was organised by the Blender foundation.

[From Wikipedia]
Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film that was produced almost completely using open source software, except for the modular sound studio Reaktor and the cluster that rendered the final production which ran Mac OS X. It premiered on March 24, 2006, after about 8 months of work. Beginning in September 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later renamed Machina and then to Elephants Dream after the way in which Dutch children’s stories abruptly end.
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The film was first announced in May 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation’s program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender was the primary piece of software used in the creation of the film. The project was joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has his or her name listed in the film’s credits. The bulk of processing for rendering this film was donated by the BSU Xseed, a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5-based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame [1]. The completed film is 10 minutes 54 seconds long, including 1 minute and 28 seconds of credits.