!!!EXCITING NEWS!!!
Ton Roosendaal has announced a follow up to the Orange project and more!
The Peach Open Movie
"As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie."
Three well known Blender artists / animators: " Sacha "Sago" Goedegebure (Netherlands) and Lyubomir Kovachev (Bulgaria) have been approached. They will work with producer Ton Roosendaal to pick the other team members, define the concept and get a great script to work with. Andy Goralczyk, art director of the former Orange team, has accepted to join the team to migrate his experience especially."
If you want to be part of the process, see the details on the Blender announcement site.
DIGG IT
Blender Institute for Open 3D Projects -
"Because of the overwhelming success of the first open movie project, Ton Roosendaal, the Blender Foundation's chairman, now works on establishing the "Blender Institute". This will be a permanent office and studio to more efficiently organize the Blender Foundation goals, but especially to coordinate and facilitate Open Projects related to 3D movies, games or special effects."
Game Project
"As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry."
''Elephants Dream'' was the first "open source movie" produced with 3D modeling tool Blender. The film is  available under a  Creative Commons Attribution license and received mixed reactions.

The Blender Foundation, which maintains the open source 3D tool Blender, has announced two new projects, codenamed ''Peach'' and ''Apricot''. ''Project Peach'' will be a new open source movie, following in the footsteps of last year's Elephants Dream project (which was initially codenamed ''Orange''). ''Apricot,'' on the other hand, will use Blender in conjunction with open source 3D framework Crystal Space to create an open game, thereby showcasing both technologies.

The Blender Foundation published the plans on its website on Sunday. In order to support these and future projects, it will also set up a permanent studio called the "Blender Institute", where software developers and artists can work together in a single location. 

The ''Peach'' movie project will be headed by Sacha "Sago" Goedegebure from the Netherlands and Lyubomir Kovachev from Bulgaria. Goedegebure is well known in the Blender community for the  "Man in Man" animation, which won the  2006 Suzanne Award for Character Animation. Where the theme of ''Elephants Dream'' was dark and industrial, ''Peach'' will be "funny and furry", according to the project announcement. The project is to be completed within 6 months, beginning October 1.

Blender's open game project is still at an earlier planning stage, and details will be announced at the  Crystal Space Conference in July. According to the published plans, the project will also be completed within 6-8 months, and it will have a budget of more than 50,000 Euros.