''Big Buck Bunny'' (code-named Project Peach) is a 2008 animated comedy short film featuring animals of the forest, made by the Blender Institute, part of the

Blender Foundation The Blender Foundation is a Dutch nonprofit organization (Stichting) responsible for the development of Blender (software), Blender, an Open-source software, open-source 3D computer graphics software, 3D content-creation program. The foundation ...

. Like the foundation's previous film, '' Elephants Dream'', the film was made using Blender, a

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

application for 3D computer modeling and animation developed by the same foundation. Unlike that earlier project, the tone and visuals departed from a cryptic story and dark visuals to one of comedy, cartoons, and light-heartedness. It was released as an open-source film under the

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

Attribution 2.5 license.

Plot

The plot follows a day in the life of Big Buck Bunny, during which time he meets three bullying rodents: the leader, Frank the

flying squirrel Flying squirrels (scientifically known as Pteromyini or Petauristini) are a tribe (biology), tribe of 50 species of squirrels in the family (biology), family Squirrel, Sciuridae. Despite their name, they are not in fact capable of full flight i ...

, and his sidekicks Rinky the red squirrel and Gimera the

chinchilla Chinchilla refers to either of two species ('' Chinchilla chinchilla'' and '' Chinchilla lanigera'') of crepuscular rodents of the parvorder Caviomorpha, and are native to the Andes mountains in South America. They live in colonies called "her ...

. The rodents amuse themselves by harassing helpless creatures of the forest by throwing fruits, nuts, and rocks at them. After the rodents kill two butterflies with an apple and a rock, and then attack Bunny, he sets aside his gentle nature and orchestrates a complex plan to avenge the two butterflies. Using a variety of traps, Bunny first dispatches Rinky and Gimera. Frank, unaware of the fate of the other two, is seen taking off from a tree, and gliding towards a seemingly unsuspecting Bunny. Once airborne, Frank triggers Bunny's final series of traps, causing Frank to crash into a tree branch and plummet into a spike trap below. At the last moment, Frank grabs onto what he believes is the branch of a small tree, but discovers it is just a twig Bunny is holding over the spikes. Bunny snatches up Frank. The film concludes with Bunny being pleased with himself as a butterfly flies past him holding a string, at the end of which is Frank attached as a flying kite.

Production

Following '' Elephants Dream'' (2006), ''Big Buck Bunny'' is the first project by the Blender Foundation to be created by the Blender Institute, a division of the foundation set up specifically to facilitate the creation of

open content Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software, software program, or any other creative Media (communication), content for which there are very minimal ...

films and games. Work began in October 2007. The film was funded by the Blender Foundation, donations from the Blender community, pre-sales of the film's DVD and commercial sponsorship. Both the final product and production data, including animation data, characters and textures are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. It was rendered on

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished fro ...

facility Sun Grid. As in ''Elephants Dream'', Blender developers worked extensively to improve the software in accordance with the needs of the movie team. Improvements were made in hair and fur rendering, the

particle system A particle system is a technique in game physics, motion graphics, and computer graphics that uses many minute sprites, 3D models, or other graphic objects to simulate certain kinds of "fuzzy" phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to rep ...

, UV mapping, shading, the render pipeline, constraints, and skinning. Also introduced during the project was approximate ambient occlusion. These features were released to the public with Blender 2.46.

Release

The film was officially released in an April 10, 2008 premiere in Amsterdam while online movie downloads and files were released on May 30, 2008. The film's complete score was released on June 6, 2008 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 license. It was available to download in MP3 and OGG Vorbis file formats. On May 2, 2012 the film was released on Nintendo Video in Europe as part of a special partnership with

Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto. It develops, publishes, and releases both video games and video game consoles. The history of Nintendo began when craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi ...

and the Blender Foundation. It was split into three instalments, with one releasing each week. The film was recreated in stereoscopic 3D by Studio Lumikuu. High-resolution,

stereoscopic Stereoscopy, also called stereoscopics or stereo imaging, is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

, high-frame-rate versions of the film were released in 2013 by Janus Kristensen's Big and Ugly Rendering Project running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform. The film was followed up with an open game titled '' Yo Frankie!'', in August 2008.

Characters

The main character (called Big Buck Bunny) was also used in short films created by Studio Lumikuu and Renderfarm.fi:
What is Renderfarm.fi?
' (2011) telling about the advantages of render farms an
''BBB loves CC'' (2012)
promoting Creative Commons licences. The bunny's voice was performed by Jan Morgenstern, the composer of the film's soundtrack. Frank the flying squirrel is also the

player character A player character (also known as a playable character or PC) is a fictional Character (arts), character in a video game or tabletop role-playing game whose actions are controlled by a player rather than the rules of the game. The characters tha ...

in the Blender Institute's 2009 video game '' Yo Frankie!''.

Legacy

Big Buck Bunny is commonly used to test video playback since it is royalty-free as well as being bright and colorful.

References

External links

* * * {{Blender Foundation Dutch comedy films Dutch animated short films Computer-animated short films Open content short films Films made using Blender Articles containing video clips Creative Commons-licensed films Animated films about rabbits and hares Animated films about squirrels Films released on YouTube 2008 animated short films 2008 computer-animated films Test items