Elephants Dream

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Elephants Dream
Image:Elephants Dream Emo Proog s6.jpg A frame from the final rendering.
Directed by	Bassam Kurdali
Produced by	Ton Roosendaal
Starring	Cas Jansen Tygo Gernandt
Music by	Jan Morgenstern
Release date(s)	2006
Running time	11 min
Language	English
Budget	€120,000
IMDb profile

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film made entirely<ref>Except for Reaktor (a modular sound studio) and Mac OS X (the OS of the cluster used to render the final production), all software used was open source.</ref> using open source applications and premiered on March 24, 2006 after about 8 months of work. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. Its name was later changed from Machina (the pronunciation of which the creators couldn't decide on) and renamed to Elephants Dream (named after the way in which Dutch childrens' stories abruptly end).<ref>Making of Elephants Dream (12 min. 04 sec.)</ref>

1 Overview
2 Story
3 Cast
4 Crew
5 Software and tools used
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] Overview

The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender was the primary piece of software used in the creation of the film. The project was joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has his or her name listed in the film's credits. The bulk of processing for rendering this film was donated by the BSU Xseed [1], a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5-based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame [2]. The completed film is 11 minutes long, including 1 minute and 30 seconds of credits.

Image:Elephants Dream s5 both.jpg

The film's purpose is primarily to field test, develop and showcase the capabilities of open source software, demonstrating what can be done with such tools in the field of organizing and producing quality content for films.

During the film's development, several new features such as an integrated node-based compositor, hair and fur rendering [3], rewritten animation system and render pipeline, and many workflow tweaks and upgrades were added into Blender especially for the project.

The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [4], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please (provided attribution is given). The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the film on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.

Image:Elephants Dream f11621.png

The film was released for download directly and via BitTorrent on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.

[edit] Story

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie opens on a small bridge between two nearly endless walls. The old man, Proog, shoves the younger and less experienced Emo down onto the ground to save him from being mown down by a barrage of jack plugs that whir back and forth between the two massive, 1930-40s switch-board-like walls. The plugs rush back and forth, oblivious of the two, endlessly channelling streams of bizarre sounds and data. After the whirring, squealing plugs move on, Proog makes sure that Emo is unharmed and then urges him onwards through a crack in one of the plug-walls, saying that "it isn't safe" and that they should go.

They walk through the narrow hall into a massive room that fades away into blackness on all sides. Only one path is visible, suspended in mid-air that runs between thousands of dangling electric cables on which sit crowds of robin-like robotic birds. As Proog and Emo enter the room, the birds begin to wake up and notice them. Realizing the danger, Proog grabs Emo by the arm and yells to hurry.

They run along the increasingly bizarre path as the birds begin to swarm. All sound is blocked out by the birds which are making the same noises as the jack-plugs, garbled screaming and obscure sentences and static. Then the path dead-ends, stopping in the middle of no-where above the infinite drop. Proog turns around as the birds reach them and begin to dive-bomb the two.

The screen cuts to black, it isn't revealed what happens during the interlude.

Proog stands at one end of a room, suspiciously watching what appears to be a perfectly innocent 1930s candle-stick phone. It is ringing. Emo watches from the other side of the room. The phone continues to ring. After a while Emo approaches it to answer it, but Proog slaps his hands away, Emo asks why he can't answer it, and Proog picks up the phone gingerly and takes the ear-piece off the hook. As soon as the ear-piece is activated, the speaker grille slides open revealing, tangled in with the wires of the phone, a seething mass of clawed, fleshy polyps which scream and gibber obscenely in the same mechanical, staticky voice that everything else in the Machine speaks in. Proog warns that Emo could die if he's not more careful next time. There is a solemn silence, then Emo laughs in disbelief.

The screen cuts to black.

After another interlude, it opens with the two entering another massive black room. There is no path, the entry platform is the only structure that seems to be there except for another exit lit distantly at the far side. Proog takes a step forward into the void, and his feet are suddenly caught by giant type-writer arms that rocket up out of the blackness to catch his feet as he dances across mid-air. Emo follows Proog with somewhat less enthusiasm as the older man leads the way and all the while lectures Emo about the dangers of the Machine, stating it could grind them into pulp. When Emo tries to reason around the probability of dying, Proog interupts him by shouting 'pulp!' with greater and great fervor until Emo gives up and lapses into silence.

They reach the end of the room and go through a hall into a small compartment. Proog presses a button, and the door shuts. It is an elevator. The elevator lurches suddenly as it is grabbed by a giant mechanical arm and thrown upwards, rushing up through an ever-widening tunnel. When it begins to slow down, another arm grabs the capsule and throws it even further up.

As it moves up, the walls unlock and fall away, leaving only the floor with the two on it, rushing higher and higher. Proog tells Emo to close his eyes just before the platform exits the tunnel and sails into a black sky. As it reaches the peak of its arc, Proog asks Emo what he sees to the left and the right, and Emo says he sees nothing.

The elevator begins to drop down another-shaft, finally coming to rest as it slams into the floor of another room, fitting into a hole in the ground and bringing the two to a level stop.

A camera flashes.

They are in a large, dingy room filled with strange, organic looking generator-like devices and dotted with boxy holographic projectors. One of them is projecting a portion of wall with a door in it right beside them. From behind the door comes light music. The door seems harmless enough, but when Emo asks if they can go in there, Proog says, once again, that it isn't safe. He refuses to answer any more questions, and instead presses a button on his cane, which changes the holograph to another wall.

Scene cut. Interlude.

The next scene begins with Proog finishing the wall, and boxing them into a Safe Room, out of the view of anything outside. When this is finished, he turns and confronts Emo, asking why Emo can't see the beauty and perfection of the Machine--in spite of the danger--and Emo replies that it is because it isn't there, and he doesn't see any of the things they've been going through, so why should he trust his life to something that isn't there?

Proog starts in frustration, but Emo interupts and demands an answer.

Proog slaps him, trying to bring him to his senses, but Emo calls him a sick man, storming away down the length of the room towards a wall he apparently cannot see. Proog watches in horror as--instead of Emo walking into the wall--the wall begins to move, extending the length of the room to accommodate Emo's belief that none of it is real. Proog yells after him that it's a trap, and Emo turns around and begins to taunt him.

Emo: "It's a trap. (scoffs) At the left side you can see... The hanging gardens of Babylon! How's that for a trap?"

As he speaks, the walls begin to discolour and mechanical roots start tearing through the walls to his left, moving forwards towards Proog. In spite of the old man's pleas to stop. Emo continues.

"Oh, and at the right side you can see... Guess what! The collossus of Rhodes!"

The rest of the safety wall crumples away as a pair of massive hands heave out of the ground and begin to attack. As Proog is knocked down by the shockwave, Emo turns and begins to walk away, waving his finger around his temple in the 'crazy' sign, completely unaware of everything that's happening. In a last effort, Proog extricates himself from the tentacle roots, and cracks Emo over the back of the head with his cane. As Emo collapses, everything falls away, and Proog and Emo are left in one tiny patch of light in the middle of blackness.

As the screen fades to whole black, Proog whispers to the prone figure of Emo that "it is there."

Credits.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Cast

Tygo Gernandt - Proog
Cas Jansen - Emo

[edit] Crew

[edit] Software and tools used

Blender was the main program used in creation of the film. The other software was used for pre/post-productions and management of the files. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution used. KDE and GNOME were the desktop environments used.