Sintel is a next in a series of visually stunning and captivating short animation films initiated by the Blender Foundation. The previous – Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream – have been a huge success and associated The Blender name and the Foundation itself with the highest quality animation worldwide.
Sintel tells a story of a young girl on a long and dangerous quest to save her best friend, a baby dragon. With plenty of time to tell the story (this short is little over 14min – the longest of all three), the team had a chance to fully showcase both their creative and technical skills and the capabilities of their animation software, Blender. Fast action scenes, fires, landscapes & complicated facial features – all you could expect from a multimillion animation studio, but done by a small, international team of creators working on open source, free software with a budget of $550k.
Here is the sneak peak, but for the entire short we highly recommend you download the HD file from the link above. More download options (file formats, resolutions) is available on the movie’s website.
The Blender Foundation creates state of the art animation shorts to showcase the application’s capabilities, stimulate its development, validate the open source creation pipeline & encourage young artists to participate in the creative process by licensing the raw material and the final product under Creative Commons.
For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot.
You can find out more about the project, its timeline, team and the founding here.
A game based on the short is already in the works – check it out.
“The results of the Durian Open Movie project are being licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This includes all the data we’ve published online and on the DVDs, and all of the contents on this website. If any content on this site is not licensed as such, it will be clearly indicated.”
from sintel.org
Related Links:
Sintel’s Website
Blender’s Website
Blender Foundation’s Website
Sintel on YouTube (but please do yourself a favor and download the full HD version – it’s worth it!
Sintel on Wikipedia
Sintel on IMDB
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.