You’ve almost certainly seen at least snippets of the Blender Foundation’s four short animated films Elephants Dream (2006), Big Buck Bunny (2008), Sintel (2010) and Tears of Steel (2012; my blog post riffing on a memorable scene) — because they’re high quality and freely licensed for any use (CC-BY) they’re frequently used in demos.

Now Blender Foundation (who primarily make the free software Blender 3D modeling, animation, video editing, and more program; they use open movie projects to push the software forward) is working on a feature-length animated film, Gooseberry, which would mark a new milestone (Sita Sings the Blues will surely remain the best feature length free film of any sort, but was made with non-free software and is 2D).

They have an ambitious crowdfunding goal of €500,000 to support the project. I pledged and hope you’ll join me. A few interesting bits from the campaign FAQ:

What quality can we expect? Like, compared to Sintel, or a Pixar movie?

As magic number for budget calculations, I use the “Months of work per minute of film”. This is including writing, coders, art, production.

For Big Buck Bunny that was 6. For Sintel it was 10. For Gooseberry we daringly want to go to 15 even. For a Disney or Pixar film, this number is easily 300 to 500. Go figure! But our film will be better than Sintel or BBB for sure.

What is this “exploitation window”

Even though everything will be free/open source, we will reserve for the final movie (renders, final edit, grade) a short period of exploitation. That ‘window’ is 3 months, starting at the official premiere (our own, or on film festival). Film distributors can pay us for the exclusive rights to show the film in theaters during that period. Or TV stations, or Netflix! After that, all gates go open and we release it as CC-BY for everyone.

I can’t complain about the non-free “exploitation window”, as there’s zero infrastructure for marketing and distributing free-as-in-freedom films; in the short term, the window might get the film to a wider audience and thus build its cultural relevance and value as a free film after the window. The existence of free and culturally relevant films will be a huge help to any eventual such marketing and distribution infrastructure, so best of luck to the Gooseberry team in all respects.

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There’s another short made with Blender in progress called Wires For Empathy:

A 3D animated short film based in free/libre software, Tube is also a new experiment in distributed collaboration. It plays on the ancient Gilgamesh poem, in a variant of the hero’s progress that becomes the animation’s own frames.

The trailer looks great:

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Sympathy for the Strawberry is not one of my favorite Sonic Youth tracks, but the above titles made me think of it. I would heavily contribute to a crowdfunded free-as-in-freedom album by a reunited band sans Thurston Moore, call it Free Sonic Youth. Which part (free or Thurston-free) is most unlikely?