Production

HAPPY CLOUD – music video & SXSW documentary

16 March, 2014 |  10 Comments | by Ton Roosendaal

Starring: Francesco Siddi (coder, dancer), Ton Roosendaal (talking)
Directed by: Mathieu Auvray

http://cloud.blender.org/gooseberry/

Music:
Happy (Pharrell Williams)
Thank You, Good Bye, It’s Over (Bewitched Hands)

SXSW is one of the most important music, film and interactive festivals in the United States. It takes place in Austin, Texas every year for 10 days of concerts, conferences, movies and tradeshows. It’s the perfect place to meet companies, actors, musicians, directors, producers, agents and sponsors. 

We went to SXSW to promote The Gooseberry Project on a booth at the tradeshow.  It was an exciting week for Ton Roosendaal, Francesco Siddi and me (Mathieu Auvray). We had to finalize the online campaign and the Blender Cloud, while presenting and promoting it at the tradeshow!

I had the chance to attend conference talks, movies and concerts – more than Ton and Francesco, who were working harder than ever on the launch of the campaign and the Cloud. This video is a short testimony I’d like to share of what happened there.
Crazy good times and wonderful memories already !

Hope this movie reflects that a bit :)

Let us make Francesco still happy:
Subscribe and use the Blender Cloud!

Mathieu Auvray
Paris, France


10 Responses

  1. S J Bennett says:

    And suddenly out of nowhere, dancing Francesco! And more story details!

    So can we expect a dance number in the film? :)

  2. Luciano says:

    Hahahahah very nice, you guys keep on having fun and making awesoma

    Cheers!

  3. Kees says:

    Great little movie. Happy!

  4. bullx says:

    engaging!
    have a nice time working on this project, blender team!

  5. guiese says:

    3,5 millions dollars is a huge pile of money, euro is even bigger. And the site says you gained just ~50000 in 9 days with 32 days left. I don’t know how big marketing is needed to reach the goal especially with all the situation between Ukrained and Russia. Ukrainians have huge problems at the moment to think about Blender. The rest of the world simply doesn’t know much about this project to begin with.
    I tried to spam on different sites, people do not care. You still didn’t start much of the work and can possibly to make a more generic animation that would apply to more people. Awards that you give for pledge don’t cover even half of what others interested in(some figures, posters, artbooks, cups etc).
    Make more pledge options like 5, 10, 30, etc and give some small awards for them as well. Alot of projects on kickstarter are making both sum of money and voices from people because of $5, $10 options.
    Sintel had much bigger marketing than Gooseberry, it was on all news sites. Nothing about Goosberry is known outside of Blender community. But its the usual people that you need to invove in the process not blender folks. Country is rich when its making money in different countries, same here, you neede to make money outside of Bleder community. Trailer should be different though, and frankly wider audience would like either pure comedy or action type of animation.
    Also there are parents that would like to make their kids’ names into the credits and give some figures. And the price is quite big right now. You can make different price based on the age.

    • Manuel says:

      I kinda have to agree with this one.
      We really need the big marketing happening soon, or i dont see the campaign going successfull. Not even on BA we have a button, a banner or something. This campaign needs any publicity that is available…

    • Sintel got us about 1700 dvds in the crowdfunding period – which lasted almost 2 months! Minus shipping costs, sales tax and dvd printing that’s like 50k euro.

      A lot of extra sales (dvds, sponsors) came in during the film production though.

      So, in that sense we’re already ahead (in 8 days :)
      But I agree, we need more aggressive promotion. Working on it!

      More small pledges: our analysis of similar indiegogo projects show that not much money come in from small pledges (less than 5% of total). Most of the campaign income is from perks in the 30-70 USD range. Indigogo advised me to not even *think* of raising more than 500k USD there. Well – that doesn’t make us a feature film…

      I also wrote an article here about my analysis and conclusion – to make it first a Blender community campaign. It’s about Blender you know, it’s about us. It’s about WE as a community, and about we making a feature film together, as a means to make Blender more awesome.

      Just costs you 250 dollar, in 18 payments for 18 months.
      That helps us kickstarting Blender Cloud – which is aimed at replacing the e-shop business that helped Blender 10 years so well.

      Traditional film crowdfunder give away random stuff that has nothing to do with making the film.

      We give away the film itself, and we make openly. Better you can’t get! :)
      But – we need enough people for that. If these people don’t exist, we better not make a feature film then. Enough other things to do :)

      • Manuel says:

        Will subscribe to the Blender Cloud definetly, its worth the price even without Gooseberry!
        Just the public attention really needs to lift off on this one soon! :)

      • Martin says:

        I think the people are there but they have to hear about it that is probably one of the biggest challenges

  6. congcong009 says:

    haha this looks so much fun to make cloud for blender! nice video and wish gooseberry could reach the goal before deadline :)

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