Blender Tools,Production

Code with Gooseberry Flavor

19 March, 2015 |  16  

The Gooseberry project moves ever forward and the team is deep into making the movie. Blender is being put to the test again and modified to meet the needs of this production. So, what do code monkeys do in this environment behind the scenes? What are their eating habits? What branches do they climb on? […]

Pipeline,Production

Cycles, Instances, and Memory

16 February, 2015 |  10  

Hey everyone. Today I wanted to talk about memory usage during rendering, tips to keep it low and some areas of Blender that need love to avoid causing the memory to skyrocket. This post is actually inspired by the investigation work I’ve been doing over the weekend, looking into the memory consumption of the shot from […]

Meet the Team,Pipeline,Production

BAM! BAM! BAM!

28 January, 2015 |  2  

Francesco Siddi is our production and pipeline coordinator/developer. Currently he’s working on the asset management system, which is in use by the studio already and browsable online at cloud.blender.org! Directed and edited (using Blender’s Video Sequence Editor!) by Mathieu Auvray. Music by Abelcoast, “Vital fury and meticulous rage”. CC-BY-SA

Meet the Team,Production

New team member: Gabriel Caraballo

20 January, 2015 |  4  

Today Gabriel ‘eibriel’ Caraballo arrived in the studio. In the past years he’s worked as lead TD for the Kiribati film project in Argentina, responsible for the pipeline, asset/project software, and making sure Blender fits into the overall production well. Gabriel will be working for two months with Francesco on our own pipeline,  especially making […]

Production

Job position: Blender character animator, for 4-6 months

17 January, 2015 |  13  

We need another Gooseberry team member here, to work with as a character animator in our animation team with Hjalti and Sarah. Requirements: Available to work full-time in Amsterdam for the working period (at least March-August) EU citizen, and/or has a valid working and residence permit for the Netherlands Has a public portfolio of own animation […]

Blender Tools,Pipeline,Production

Blender 2.73 – a new storyboard workflow

15 January, 2015 |  18  

Several 2d animators and story(board) artists have been reporting exciting results with the upgraded “Grease Pencil” annotation tool in Blender. What started as a quick way to add notes in the viewport has now grown into a powerful animation tool for sketching storyboards — and even final animations. Matias Mendiola, who worked here on Cosmos […]

Making Of,Production

Voice acting: recording the film-set way

12 January, 2015 |  3   Gallery

Last Thursday and Friday we recorded the main character voices in (radio & tv) Studio Desmet, just around the corner here. Instead of locking actors up in booths with headphones and a microphone, we decided to find a recording studio with enough space for actors to move around freely – using  headsets and several microphones […]

Production

Demo: Victor’s New Rig, by Juan Pablo

9 January, 2015 |  23  

Victor's toon rigging allows you to distort pretty much EVERYTHING.

Project Gooseberry’s Argentinian rigger Juan Pablo Bouza, or JP for short, has created a new rig for Cosmos Laundromat owner Victor. AND he has created a 37-minute demo showing off how it’s made and what it can do. (Spoiler Alert: It can do a LOT!)   Playing with the Rig: Your Cheat Sheet Watched the video above […]

Making Of,Production,Weeklies

Final Weekly of the Year: December 19, 2014

22 December, 2014 |  10  

The year is coming to a close, and everyone is going (has gone) on vacation. Meaning: this is it for 2014! This weekly started two hours early (a) so that Mathieu could participate before leaving for France and (b) so the rest of the team could leave early for a studio trip to see The […]

Making Of,Production

The infrastructure, invisible work, and pragmatism of open-source animation production

12 December, 2014 |   

Julia Velkova at the Blender Institute

New Production Phase, New People Okay, two and a half days at the Blender Institute and my brain is spinning again with ideas and new questions of how to connect the bits and pieces of the open-source animation film-making culture. By all scholarly standards, a brief visit lasting 2.5 days is nothing for getting input […]