Now Playing: Big Buck Bunny

1 June 2008

It’s here! Big Buck Bunny is a free short movie created by the Peach open movie project. The animated movie is freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means, according to their “about” page: “you can freely reuse and distribute this content, also commercially, for as long you provide a proper attribution.”

Big Buck Bunny was made primarily with the awesome free Blender 3D graphics software. As far as I know, all the software used was free software, so you can download software and project files all for free and use them however you wish. That’s cool.

I wrote about the project last year: Peach! (Free Software, Free Movies). I’ve been following their blog with interest since learning about the project and investing in it by sending $40 to pre-order the DVD last September.

Still waiting for the DVD to arrive in Minnesota from Amsterdam, but I downloaded one of the Ogg Theora movie files from the site to do a vanity check on my name in the credits, a benefit of ordering before October. And I was crushed to see I wasn’t in the list. Hugely disappointed. Either I was overlooked, or I’m just a big liar and didn’t send in any money last September. But they did take my $40 and I do have an order number, so we’ll see if I get the DVD. Not all that big a deal, I suppose, but I was looking forward to that small token showing I supported the project at an early stage. I believe we can have good stuff in free culture and would have been proud to see my name in the credit roll. But again, it’s a minor thing.

Congratulations to the Peach project on successfully completing and releasing the movie, and keep up the good work. More free stuff, please! :-)

Update!

3 June 2008: Received the DVD yesterday although haven’t watched it yet. Also received an email from Anja at the Blender e-shop who tells me they had a small number of errors on the credits, including mine, and they’d like to offer me a BBB t-shirt as a gesture to compensate for the error. Well, that’s just super. T-shirts are always welcome. It was unnecessary towards keeping my good will, but much appreciated all the same. (Also mentioned was that they are planning improvements to the crediting process for next time.)

Now to go pop some popcorn and watch the movie…

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 1 June 2008 at 8:47 pm
filed under blender, graphics, movies