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Press Release
May 18, 2006
For Immediate Release
Elephants Dream, internet release of the first 3D ‘Open Movie’
(Blender Foundation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - The 3D animated short ‘Elephants Dream’ will today be released as a free and public download. This is the final stage of a successfully completed Open Movie project which has been community-financed, using only Open Source tools, and opening up the movie itself as well as the entire studio database for everyone to re-use and learn from. The movie and production files are licensed as “Creative Commons Attribution 2.5″, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution.
In the past weeks, the donating sponsors have received the dual DVD set of this project in their mailbox. This DVD set remains for sale via the blender.org e-shop as support product for future Open Movie projects. The Blender Foundation is committed to start working on similar projects soon.
The movie files and download mirrors can be accessed here:
http://www.elephantsdream.org/download
Elephants Dream is the culmination of the Orange Open Movie Project, produced by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The project was conceived to help develop and establish the capabilities of the Blender 3D open source tool for the creation of cinema quality animation.
The film tells the story of Emo and Proog, two people with different visions of the surreal world in which they live. Viewers are taken on a journey through that world, full of strange mechanical birds, stunning technological vistas and machinery that seems to have a life of its own.
‘Elephants Dream’ features the voice talents of renowned Dutch movie actors Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen, as well as an original score by German composer Jan Morgenstern. The short brought together the talents of a team of artists from countries as diverse as Syria, Germany, Australia, Finland, and the Netherlands. In addition to the performances of the cast and creative efforts of the lead artists, Elephants Dream has had the assistance of hundreds of individuals across the world who contributed a variety of work such as programming additional functionality for Blender, creating textures used in some of the scenes, and providing international translations for the DVD release.
The files have been released on two DVDs with the movie in PAL, NTSC and HD formats, a making-of documentary, and all of the studio files. The DVDs were shipped in early May 2006. As promised, shortly after, the movie and database of source material is now available for public download as well.
Studio Orange team:
Director: Bassam Kurdali (Syria /USA),
Art Director: Andreas Goralczyk (Germany)
Lead Artists: Matt Ebb (Australia), Bastian Salmela (Finland), Lee Salvemini (Australia)
Technical Director: Toni Alatalo (Finland)
For more information:
http://www.elephantsdream.org
http://www.blender.org
Contact:
Ton Roosendaal
Chairman, Blender Foundation
Email: ton(at)blender.org
Emo and Proog, the lead characters of the movie



The 3D animated short film ''Elephants Dream'', formerly known as ''Project Orange'', was released to the Internet yesterday. The film is available under the  Creative Commons Attribution License, allowing anyone to download, modify and distribute it. The 10-minute film has been called "the first open source movie" by ''NewsForge''. Not only is the movie itself free content, even the computer files containing the 3D models used in the film are available under the same terms.

The project was first announced one year ago and was jointly produced by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The film tells the story of Emo and Proog, two men trapped inside a surreal machine world. Only freely available open source software was used to create the movie. Most of the work was done using Blender, a 3D modelling and rendering tool. The Blender Foundation is selling an extended edition on DVD, which includes subtitles in 34 languages, a ''Making Of'' documentary, commentary tracks, and all files used to create the movie.

In spite of the successful completion of the project, the Blender Foundation "has no intention to grow or expand into a company or studio" according to the project website. "Instead, the Foundation aims at endorsing and supporting activities within (educational) institutes, universities and companies."