The campaign wrap-up has been nearly completed now. Everyone should have had one or more emails about their pledges, refunds or activation of donations for the Gooseberry Pilot project. Good news is that nearly all of the bigger sponsors stayed on board, we hardly had to do refunds for PayPal either! We’re now waiting for the biggest chunk – people who pledged to join Blender Cloud but who didn’t pay yet.
Here’s a short overview of our current todo items and plans.
MAY 2014
Cloud:
- Pablo Vazquez is now working full-time for Blender Institute. He will work on the Blender Cloud webdesign, navigation/lay-out, and migrate over a lot of more (old) tutorial content.
- Francesco Siddi also works on Cloud – doing support, payment systems, and coordinate further development there with Inez Almeida (who’s here next week).
- Andy Goralczyk works on Creature Factory 2 now. He will be here tomorrow/sunday to schedule the work – but for fun mostly and hangout with Matt Ebb who visits us as well. The CF2 project is meant to get a full release in Blender Cloud.
- Sebastian Koenig will work on updating and new tutorials for his well known “Track Match Blender” tutorials.
- There are also plans to upgrade scenes from Big Buck Bunny and Sintel to Blender 2.71. More about that later.
Development:
- Sergey Sharybin is working here for three weeks. One week was for motion tracking and libmv, one for subsurf and bug fixing, and next week for planning Gooseberry too.
- Next week we have Brecht van Lommel, Antonis Ryakiotakis and Lukas Toenne here for Gooseberry planning as well. Lots of stuff to discuss and get aligned well together.
- End of next week Bart Veldhuizen is here to help us to conclude the asset/content management research – and we’ll schedule what to do next.
Film:
- After next week, Mathieu Auvray and Esther Wouda will work here with us on the story, synopsis and scheduling the work for the coming months.
- A more solid financial estimate will be made this month, so we can also define how many people can work here, and/or in other units.
- Recruitment calls could go out end of May too! We might need a full-time storyboarder here in july/august. Contact me.
- We have a very nice grant to hire writers/reporters to make sure Gooseberry is well documented and communicated. This should get started up now too.
JUNE 2014
- Aim is still to keep the month calendar clear to do Blender Institute office reconstructions. We’re already using it since 2007 – it’s getting shabby.
- Gooseberry blog and cloud.blender.org will get a lot of upgrades
JULY 2014
- Antonis+Lukas start working here full time (and live in Amsterdam)
- Mathieu starts working here on the script + storyboarding, with Esther too.
- David Revoy comes over as well! He is on board as concept artist but will work mostly from his quiet home studio.
- Aim is to have story and concept development (text, art, storyboards) all be available for our cloud subscribers! But we’ll share a good amount here on the blog for everyone too.
AUGUST 2014
- Same as July.
- Siggraph is this month too!
SEPTEMBER 2014
- Either this month or some weeks or a month later the rest of the team members come over to start working on the Gooseberry Pilot. This will be more clear end of May only.
Yep, we’ll be busy :)
-Ton-
Ton, what did Sergey implemented on the libmv side? Are there improvements/features coming to our tracker?
Many greetings and I’m so happy to be part of this community… Thomas
I promised the coders to not spread gossip about it and allow them their moment of glory showing the work for the first time!
Great to see the progress over the years Ton, obviously as part of the original “not a number” team for a while I’m biased towards the project and wish it every success!
Hey edwin, that’s a long time ago! Thanks for the thumbs up :)
Impatient to read the final script and see how it will be adapted to the new format !
great news that so many stayed on board! i’m looking for war to watching the progress of the project now keep up the good work guys
“There are also plans to upgrade scenes from Big Buck Bunny and Sintel to Blender 2.71.”
I’m not sure I understand this one properly. Do you mean there are upgrades to the films ? O_o
As far as I know, the older Open Movies aren’t compatible with the latest versions of Blender. So, I expect Ton means to make them compatible.
Well, he did say “more on that later”.
The BBB and Sintel files don’t render correctly in current versions. And we didn’t have cycles even then.
some scenes in movies will be re- rendered to fix flaws
like sintel hair sim ,lighting.
when these movie where in production tools and cycles where not ready .
gooseberry technical target are improved hair ,cloth sim.
Will there be a reddit AMA to give ideas about the blender cloud?
Great to see there’s a budget for documenting and communicating the creative process. Really looking forward to that.
The ongoing documentary series by 2 Player Productions for “Broken Age” has been amazing – it’s created a stack of extra value for backers while they were waiting for the game to come out. It’s been a really candid look behind the scenes at the ups and downs of making the game, including the sucky parts.
If it’s within the scope of the grant and the creators are willing to participate, a video documentary series would be great. As long as someone invests in a lapel mic..
Hello. I definitely want to make the music for this film! Can I?
Hey Ton! To follow up on the question above, I was wondering if you guys hold “apprentice” positions of any kind at the studio, even if only for the period of the pilot film’s production? I’m really just a newbie, but I am set on learning blender in and out and hopefully launching a career from there. And Project Gooseberry is only getting me even more excited. :)
Creature Factory 2 available on dvd or usb ?
Have you taught about doing another crowdsourcing campaign in June?
Magnificent beat ! I wish to apprentice while you amend your site, how can i subscribe for a blog web site?
The account aided me a appropriate deal. I have been a little bit acquainted of this your
broadcast provided shiny transparent concept