SKIRMISHER

This is probably stale news to the geekier ones among us, but I’d just have to say this. The folks who’ve made Elephants Dream must be pretty orgasmic right now. Their latest stats say around a million people have downloaded the free movie. And if you haven’t done so yet, you can get it now without having to fear the killjoys at the MPAA.

If you’ve been living under a rock [or just been staying away from the web], Elephants Dream is the world’s first “open movie” created entirely of open-source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

Say the folks from the Orange Open Movie Team:

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world. It tells the story of Emo and Proog, two people with different visions of the surreal world in which they live. Viewers are taken on a journey through that world, full of strange mechanical birds, stunning technological vistas and machinery that seems to have a life of its own.

Elephants Dream features the voice talents of renowned Dutch movie actors Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen, as well as an original score by German composer Jan Morgenstern. The short brought together the talents of a team of artists from countries as diverse as Syria, Germany, Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands.

In addition to the performances of the cast and creative efforts of the lead artists, Elephants Dream has had the assistance of hundreds of individuals across the world who contributed a variety of work such as programming additional functionality for Blender, creating textures used in some of the scenes, and providing international translations for the DVD release.

What does it mean for the rest of us? It means if you have enough talent and access to machines that meet, say, Blender’s system requirements, you can now stop jerking off into some girl’s high heels and produce and pretend to be Hayao Miyazaki for a while.

Download the whole movie and its complete soundtrack here.

ELEPHANTS DREAM SITE

BLENDER

Stumble it!