Production

June production update
team start: 29 July!

19 June, 2014 |  12 Comments | by Ton Roosendaal

It’s been quiet on the blog, but there’s been a lot of activity in the past month. Here’s the short summary of past week’s activities and the upcoming events!

Blender CloudCloudScreenieHjalti

A new design has been implemented, a lot of software rewritten and improved, and we’re ready to add a lot more now. Francesco Siddi and Pablo Vazquez spent full time on this all of June, and will be spending near full time on it next month.

We also hired Bart Veldhuizen to help us implementing the new administration and payment backend for the Cloud and the Estore – so we can give people much better support, invoices, overviews, accont info on the credits, and so on. 

Andy Goralczyk’s Creature Factory

Within a few days Blender Cloud gets its first new huge tutorial CF2series – showing and explaining the making of an epic dinosaur scene.

Blender Institute Studio revamp

We’ve kicked out a lot of old crap, fixed electricity & the ancient ventilation system, remove wallpaper, clean/sand/painted all floors, upgraded the viewing room, and much more.

Fun side projects

Blender Cloud will get BBB and Sintel upgraded to work in 2.7x Blender! Sintel with Cycles, BBB in ‘internal’. At least a minute per film, probably more.
We also asked Sebastian Koenig to upgrade his tutorial series on Motion Tracking.

Script writing commences

Esther and Mathieu worked on writing the Pilot synopsis. It’s getting so exciting :) The work will get shared with our supporters starting August, when also concept art and storyboarding starts here. We have to devise a way to share the script in a way it’s not spoiling the fun… might be on a special SPOILER area on Blender Cloud? I will think it over. For the coming weeks I prefer to give the writing process a quiet and focused period of solitude though.

Concept art and story team

Per 29 July we start working on the visuals more, this to also help the writing process. We’ve hired a special unit in this building with 20 meters of wall where piSarah Storyboardctures can be attached on. In the story room will work:

  • Mathieu Auvray (director)
  • David Revoy (concept art)
  • Sarah Laufer (concept art, storyboarding, see image)
  • Pablo Vazquez (concept art, character concepts)
  • Matias Mendiola (story boarding, starts september)
  • Esther Wouda (writing)

The Amsterdam Gooseberry Pilot unit

Here’s the current shortlist of people we will have on board (or whom we talk to). They will stream in during August/September/October period.

  • Mathieu Auvray (director)
  • Ton Roosendaal (producer)
  • Francesco Siddi (production coordination)
  • Pablo Vazquez (artist)
  • Hjalti Hjalmarsson (animator)
  • Manu Järvinen (modeler)
  • William Reynish (animator, still discussing it with him)
  • Andy Goralczyk (artist, still discussing it with him)
  • Lukas Toenne (developer)
  • Antonis Ryakiotakis (developer)
  • Campbell Barton (developer, here for 3 months)
  • Sergey Sharybin (developer, for some months here, rest works from home

More people will possibly be added, but this depends on how the script develops, and how well do financially. Some work will be done by people in one of the other units as well.

The blog & documentation team

Thanks to a very cool subsidy by the Netherlands Creative Industry Fund, we can recruit and hire a number of people who will help reporting and documenting the Gooseberry project – also to get ourselves much better connected to the outside real world. Their work is public and will be open/free for everyone on this blog. We’ll start working on this mid july, wait a bit more news on this in 3 weeks.

The Blender Cloud: our production environment, and yes we share everything!
We aim at using Blender Cloud ourselves for versioning, storage and collaboration. Several people will work remotely on the Pilot anyway! Expect a lot of concept art and storyboards to be available right away – the day it gets made.

The script is still the most vulnerable part to share, but we’ll established a nice (fenced?) area for it where people who really like to see script development can share and feedback. How this will look like we’ll have to devise further in the course of July.

Thanks,

-Ton-

 


12 Responses

  1. JG Loquet says:

    Great to hear some news from Gooseberry,
    Looking forward to checking out the first pilot preprod material in the Blender cloud !

  2. luciano says:

    if you need an other animator count me in! :D

  3. Fred C says:

    600 to 900 seconds of animation and two animators. Please say this isn’t so.

  4. comeinandburn says:

    Please take special care to hire an experienced documentary team with good equipment for sound and video recording. The previous documentary looked very amateurish, not because of what it said or how it was put together, the image/sound quality wasn’t up to par.

    It seems superficial but makes a huge impression on how anyone outside the Blender sphere perceives these projects.

  5. John says:

    How do you change your email in the blender cloud?

    • Jean Montambeault says:

      Use the ‘Contact Us’ in your profile settings and someone will contact you quickly. Each time I needed something Francesco was there within a day weekdays.

  6. abc says:

    I wanted to say a good word for you guys truly deserve it! But after posting 2X on 2 different with none of the posts getting through, is it safe to say that this system is broken?

    • jyri says:

      Well that one got through :) Maybe something to do with my email/user combination.

      Your good will and talent is truly admired as you empower everyone with this amazing and rapidly evolving software! Features and art output that even the huge studios struggle with or leave undone for decade(s). This is what makes Blender and team behind it so amazing! It may be hard, it may be daunting at times, but you weather the criteria and constant user input that makes this software so incredibly lean and practical in long run!

      Thank you!

  7. Joeri says:

    Looks like a solid team.
    Stuff with bijltje and hakken and such.

  8. Fran M says:

    I would love to do concept art for you guys.

  9. Drink green tea every day, enjoy the blends and flavors that are out there.
    Take in healthy fats with each and every food: fish
    oil, olive oil, blended nuts. Watch HERE to see how to make these dreeeaaaammmmy smooth treats ;).

  10. Sean Aitken says:

    I’m really looking forward to watching the entire process. Keep it up!! Don’t let the criticism get the best of you all. Rock on!

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