tag archive: blender

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 …

Originally published 18 September 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock, because I only recently found out about the Blender project’s free and open source short movie, Elephants Dream, when I happened across Terry Hancock’s review of it last year at Free Software Magazine.

The motivation behind the project was to create a great movie short using only free and open source tools, while at the same time finding ways to improve the quality of those tools and free software projects in general.

Elephants Dream

The artists primarily used the excellent 3D modeling and animation software, Blender, along with many other free software programs, including The GIMP, CinePaint, and Inkscape. The credits page notes, “An enormous amount of improvements in [Blender] were a direct consequence of the movie project taking place.”

Most of the movie content is freely available under the Creative …