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.