sintel

the new blender movie just got uploaded. i haven't watched it yet but here are the links:

http://www.sintel.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ
http://ftp.nluug.nl/ftp/graphics/blender/durian/movies/

Very good.

Jibb

awesome

very great!

I didn't enjoy it that much and when compared to the previous bunny movie it got a lot worse. The scenes feel way too empty, the texturing often isn't that good just as some animations (e.g. the clothes being pushed around by the wind in the snowy mountains scenes). In my opinion the visuals are no comparison to the extremely well done forest setting of the bunny movie...

I also highly disliked the story which makes little sense at certain points and tries to play with emotions it fails to create in the first place. The music and sound effects were enjoyable though...

Not a crappy movie after all but it failed to live up to my expectations I guess...

the first time i watched it i couldn't help getting distracted by all the rendering and hair/cloth issues. i watched it several times and enjoyed it more each time. i liked the story but maybe it was a bit too short.

some scenes are absolutely awesome and in some scenes the quality lacks a bit. i hope they can manage the next project a bit differently so there is enough time to polish everything. probably it wasn't a good idea to start with an alpha version of blender 2.5.

i am looking forward to the dvds and the making of documentary now. i am sure it will be fun and interesting.

Well I guess the story lacks a flow and the movie is way too short to create what is needed for the ending which is meant to be very emotional. This way it at least for me didn't create enough emotions to really feel sorry for what happens in the end. It jumps around too much and in general leads to strange moments. Like for example during the chicken chase she throws down a box of apples. Strangely nobody seems to care - so why was this girl nearly starving at all? Then the dragon drops the chicken in order to go chase some birds afterwards. For another strange reason the girl didn't take the chicken with her despite chasing it before obviously in order to eat it so why wouldn't she just pick it up (and she doesn't really have any "pockets" where she could have put it)...

The entire movie pretty much delivers such strange scenes which seem to have flaws already at the storyboard stage just as rather pointless stuff like that "Secret of Mana" tree. Despite that its roots look a bit strange I guess it's just there to show the result of the use of a new feature whatever that may be. So I also guess using a movie to push Blender and its features forward is a bad idea as a movie is about the movie itself and not the cool features you now have to create whatever you show...

Sintel also seems to have quite some issues with the HD render result. I didn't watch that quality for myself but I read that the renderer seems to create some sort of artifacts which ruin the HD resolution advantage a bit...

it's a dragon tree. they look like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_(plant)

i agree that it would have been better if there had been some more time to tell the story but things like the toppled apple box isn't really a plot flaw to me. maybe the owner just took a while to notice.

yes, the renderer seems to have some issues. there is some flickering and aliasing going on sometimes and in the original render resolution it's more noticable than in the scaled down versions. they will render a 4k version. maybe the scaled down version generated from it will look better. i hope the renderer will get improved though in the future.

Well it's not so much about the kind of tree they chose - it's about that cliché and its pointless appearance:


I mean it's this cliché of the big tree with those strange kind of snake like roots which in this case stands upon some rock in some snowy mountains right next to the entrance of a dragon cave. But not only that - it's also engraved to a weapon for whatever reasons. I don't know what that old man did say about it but it occured to me to be really pointless and random...

I mean they were aware that they didn't do a feature length movie so shouldn't it have been obvious that there's no point in the raid on Sintel in the middle of nowhere where she gets a weapon which has the engraving of a tree which for no obvious reason has grown on some piece of rock in some snowy mountains right next to the entrance of the dragon cave Sintel was looking for in the first place. It's really just like they had a new tool and wanted to do a tree with it which somehow had to be integrated into the story despite it adding anything to it or even making sense. That's why I get the feeling that the focus was too much on using and testing new features in contrast to making a good movie. Those flaws in the storyline should have been pretty obvious in the storyboard stage but still they kept them...

And as I described it isn't just about this weapon-engraving-tree-cave. There's the chicken chase, the apple box, the not very well expressed reason as to why Sintel goes on the journey and also the collapsing cave at the end. For me those are too many "screw-ups" in order to really like the story...

They still did a good job despite some texture work and animations I guess which is why I think it's sad that they didn't come up with a better story that doesn't throw random and pointless stuff at you...

I too was a little dissapointed. There's parts of the movie which look great, and, considering it's an open-source project and stuff this is all great, and I'm not saying I could do better. But there were a few shots, mainly the long-range ones that were missing shadows where I thought there should be some, were missing footprints (the desert-scene has very nice ones, but the very beginning doesn't seem to have any).

Plus I'm not sure I bought the whole "my trip was so long that the dragon had time to grow up and I grew old but didn't notice it"-part.

On the bright side there were a few close-up scenes that were great, and the dragon model rocks. There were a few shots of the dragon that looked great.

they didn't have any new tool for the tree. what tool would that supposed to be?

actually there weren't any big new features at all. originally the goal was to show-off stuff like fire, smoke, fluids, crowds,... but none of that worked out in the limited time. they had enough to do with getting blender 2.5 somewhat stable. i think the fire looked nice though even if it wasn't realistically simulated but some fake turbulent texture stuff.

what's the problem with the collapsing dragon cave? you can see that the dragon destroys some of the pillars in the fight. to me you seem to see problems everywhere where they aren't any? at least not big ones. hey, dragons don't exist! that was a big flaw in the plot.

Well I don't know - I didn't really use Blender before 2.5 (maybe they tested the new sculpting, painting, multi-resolution stuff in it). Just for what other reason should they have preferred the tree over things like some actual dialogue with the old man? The way it is the tree makes no sense and adds nothing to the story despite looking cool. Still it's not just a nice setting like that ruin Sintel runs up while Scales is chasing the birds but the movie totally fails to communicate anything about that so they in my opinion should rather have done something that actually adds to the story or the atmosphere instead of this "Wow - a tree on the weapon!", "Wow - it's the actual tree!", "Wow - the dragon cave is right next to it!"...


The collapsing cave of course doesn't ruin the movie but for me it's the cherry on the cake in terms of a cheap and random story. On the one hand it's a cheap cliché and on the other hand they made it a stupid turn of events as the cave of course waits with its collapse until the dragon is dead and the "Now we reveal her true look"-scene has finished. It doesn't make any sense but just happens because the authors felt like this should happen now. It also doesn't really help the atmosphere as it pulls you out of the mood in order to be put into it again with the ending scene. From an emotional point of view (and that's what the movie in my opinion aims at) it would have been way better if she would have had a scene with the corpse. They rather chose to interrupt the entire scene setting with that "stupid" collapsing cave...


Well my complaint is that the movie throws random events together and doesn't think things to the end. I gave all the examples for it like the apple box nobody cares for, the disappearing chicken, the decision to search for Scales (the movie lacks to tell the reasons for it as it would seem Scales got picked up again by his parents - at least the movie gives no other reason for dragons flying around in order to take baby dragons with them) and all that stuff around the tree and the cave...

To me this really are major flaws as they pretty much kill any flow of the story which now consists of a collage of random scenes. Those flaws are different to the minor things you easily can ignore. Like for example that the old man tells that she's in the realm of dragons or something and the tree seems to be the symbol for it but in the end it's just a cave with one dragon the tree really relates to so why would you give this "realm" that symbol (and who was that bandit anyway that he had such a weapon)? Things like that are negligible though and you cannot expect that things are either explained or even thought through for such a simple short movie project. The scenes you present should make sense though and deliver a good story telling which is where Sintel in my opinion really is lacking...

i like the atmosphere the tree creates. i don't know what dragon trees are for in the world of the movie. dragons seem to have the need to be protected somehow and the trees in front of the caves kind of give away where dragons live so they seem to be a bit of a security problem. but to me it's fun to wonder about such stuff and i don't immediately see it as a flaw.

yes, now that you say it, the timing of the cave collapse really is a bit strange. but if you are nitpicky you can can find such things in almost any movie.

all in all i agree with you that the story is a bit too choppy and could have been told with more flow if the movie had been a few minutes longer.

I wouldn't say that it is finished in all respects, but it works for many many people, me included.
Here a quote from the replies in the Sintel blog:

Maybe, it is mainly about our expectations and our feelings, before we start viewing the movie, whether our feelings glue everything together or tear everything apart.
I'm guilty of the wish that everything fits, so for me the empathy with the main character worked, and the end didn't distract me but surprised me in a welcomed way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN6w6GnN-Ic
the sintel making of is on youtube now.

...and here is elephants dream in 3d:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-tmaMR1p3
works nicely in cross eyed mode.

I very much disagree that this video has 'odd plot parts' or random events. From a story-telling perspective it was actually pretty well done, especially because it contains quite a few scenes in which the viewer is exploring as much as the main character is. It makes things unpredictable and interesting. It doesn't feature that much lines of speech either, so what gives if the story jumps a bit?

Don't forget it's incredibly and extremely difficult to tell a good (AAA) and complete story in under 15 minutes with enough visual content to feel like a month's worth of adventuring around. I thought that they have achieved their main goal of producing a serious-quality short independent video with Blender as their main tool.

http://www.blendernation.com/2010/11/06/sintel-in-dutch-newspaper (a translation got posted in the comments)

ton roosendaal's longer term goal apparently is to do a full length movie with a budget of 20 millions. it would be great for blender if that worked out somehow.

I am very deeply impressed by this video in every way. The story is truly intense and emotional, animations are great, facial expressions are convincing, the environments are absolutely amazing. I always had to stop to look at those details. You cant catch them all when you just look the video, the huts are full of great details, there is such a great medieval street in construction, each stone is geometry, so much work. The lighting is fantastic. The music was simply great. This is a masterpiece and I can only congratulate the makers of it.

For me it worked exactly the other way around compared to Toast. I did not have high expectations for this one and I am really surprised by the quality they delivered.

http://sintelgame.org/

german article mentioned it at its end:
http://www.golem.de/1010/78374.html

The soundtrack is stunning, especially the song in the end.