Elephants Dream
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''Elephants Dream'' (code-named Project Orange during production and originally titled ''Machina'') is a 2006 Dutch animated science fiction fantasy
experimental An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs whe ...
short film A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film o ...
produced by
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 ...
using, almost exclusively,
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 ...
. The film is English-language and includes subtitles in over 30 languages.


Plot

An old man, Proog, guides the young Emo through a giant surreal machine, in which the rooms have no clear transition to each other. After Proog saves Emo from flying plugs in a room consisting of a gigantic telephone switchboard, they run through a dark room filled with electrical cables and flee from a flock of bird-like robots. In the next room, Emo is tempted to answer a ringing phone, but Proog stops him and reveals a trap. The room is also occupied by a robot resembling a self-operating typewriter, which Emo appears to laugh at. The next room is a large abyss from which metal supports appear from below; Proog nimbly dances across the abyss on the supports, while Emo casually walks along and does not seem to notice the stilts supporting him. Proog explains to Emo that the machine is like clockwork and could destroy them both if one wrong move is made. The two enter an elevator that is catapulted through a series of apertures by a pair of mechanical slats. Proog instructs Emo to close his eyes as they ascend to an empty dark void. Proog asks Emo what he sees, and is pleased by Emo's reply that he sees nothing as they plunge rapidly into the next room. A projector creates an image of a door from which music emanates. Emo asks to go through the door, but Proog insists that it is unsafe, and presses a button within his cane to enclose them both in a smaller room. Proog asks Emo why he fails to recognize the beauty and perfection of the machine, to which Emo responds that the machine does not exist. Frustrated, Proog slaps Emo across the face, pushing the startled Emo to walk away. Emo mockingly imitates Proog's earlier tour to demonstrate the machine's absurdity and manifests the twisted versions of the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed by Hellenic culture. They were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of tree ...
(in the form of mechanical roots) and the
Colossus of Rhodes The Colossus of Rhodes (; ) was a statue of the Greek sun god Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was constructed to ...
(in the form of gigantic hands), which threaten to destroy Proog's constructed world. Proog knocks Emo unconscious with his cane and causes his creations to disappear, Proog desperately asserts to Emo that the machine exists.


Production

In May 2005, Ton Roosendaal announced the project. The primary piece of software used to create the film was
Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer (from Latin ''mixus, the PPP of miscere eng. to Mix)'' or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary ...
; other programs used in production include DrQueue,
Inkscape Inkscape is a vector graphics editor. It is used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagrams, and flowcharts. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at ...
, Seashore, Twisted, Verse,
CinePaint CinePaint is a free and open source computer program for painting and retouching bitmap frames of films. It is a fork of version 1.0.4 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). It enjoyed some success as one of the earliest open source ...
,
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,
OpenEXR OpenEXR is a high-dynamic range, multi-channel raster file format, released as an open standard along with a set of software tools created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), under a free software license similar to the BSD license. It is notab ...
,
Reaktor Reaktor is a graphical modular software music studio developed by Stephan Schmidt and Volker Hinz as founders of Native Instruments (NI). It allows musicians and sound specialists to design and build their own instruments, samplers, effects a ...
,
Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of Power (philosophy), power, authority, tradition, h ...
,
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,
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,
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, and
KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...
. All of the software, except Reaktor, was free and open-source. The project was jointly funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of the funding for the project by selling
pre-order A pre-order is an order placed for an item that has not yet been released. The idea for pre-orders came because people found it hard to get popular items in stores because of their popularity. Companies then had the idea to allow customers to r ...
s of the DVD. Production began in September 2005, under the code-name ''Orange'' by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later named ''Machina'', and then finally renamed to ''Elephants Dream'' in reference to a Dutch tradition whereby parents might abruptly end children's bedtime stories with the introduction of a sneezing elephant. The primary purpose of the project was to field test, develop and showcase the capabilities of Blender, demonstrating what can be done with the software in 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, rewritten animation system and render pipeline, and many
workflow Workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a seque ...
tweaks and upgrades) were added to Blender specifically for the project. The bulk of computer processing power for rendering the film was donated by the BSU Xseed, a 2.1
TFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...
Apple
Xserve G5 The Xserve is a discontinued series of rack-mounted servers that was manufactured by Apple Inc. between 2002 and 2011. It was Apple's first rack-mounted server, and could function as a file server, web server or run high-performance computing ap ...
-based
supercomputing A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...
at
Bowie State University Bowie State University (Bowie State or BSU) is a public historically black university in Prince George's County, Maryland, north of Bowie. It is part of the University System of Maryland. Founded in 1865, Bowie State is Maryland's oldest his ...
. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame. ''Elephants Dream'' was released on March 24, 2006. The film itself, along with the other Blender Foundation “open movies,” was released under the
Creative Commons Attribution License A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bui ...
, so that viewers may learn from it and use it as long as proper attribution is given. Bassam Kurdali, the director, explained the plot of the film:
"The story is very simple—I'm not sure you can call it a complete story even—It is about how people create ideas/stories/fictions/social realities and communicate them or impose them on others. Thus Proog has created (in his head) the concept of a special place/machine, that he tries to "show" to Emo. When Emo doesn't accept his story, Proog becomes desperate and hits him. It's a parable of human relationships really—You can substitute many ideas (money, religion, social institutions, property) instead of Proog's machine—the story doesn't say that creating ideas is bad, just hints that it is better to share ideas than force them on others. There are lots of little clues/hints about this in the movie—many little things have a meaning—but we're not very "tight" with it, because we are hoping people will have their own ideas about the story, and make a new version of the movie. In this way (and others) we tie the story of the movie with the "open movie" idea."


Accolades

''Elephants Dream'' received the award for "Best Short Film" at the first European 3D Film Festival in 2010. In 2008, ''Elephants Dream'' was included in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit.


Release

On May 18, 2006, the film was released for as a direct download and via
BitTorrent BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...
on the ''Official Orange Project'' website, along with all of the production files.


DVD

Everyone who pre-ordered the DVD before a certain time could have their name listed in the film's credits. The
DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...
set includes the
NTSC NTSC (from National Television System Committee) is the first American standard for analog television, published and adopted in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard 170. In 1953, a second ...
and
PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...
versions on separate discs, a computer file of an HD version, and all the production files.


Stereoscopic release

In 2010, four years after the original release, the film was entirely re-rendered in
stereoscopic 3D 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 ...
by Wolfgang Draxinger. The project was announced to the public in mid-September on BlenderNation, and premiered at the 2010 Blender Conference. The stereoscopic version was rendered in
Digital Cinema Package A Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a collection of digital files used to store and convey digital cinema (DC) audio, image, and data streams. The term was popularized by Digital Cinema Initiatives, Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC in its original ...
(DCP) 2K flat resolution, with a slightly wider aspect format which required adjustment of the camera lens parameter in every shot. Many scenes in the original production files used flat 2D matte paintings which were integrated into the rendered images during the compositing phase. For the 3D production each matte painting had to be manipulated or entirely recreated into versions for each eye. Draxinger implemented a number of stereoscopic features in
Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer (from Latin ''mixus, the PPP of miscere eng. to Mix)'' or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary ...
to aid in the stereoscopic production process. However, these features were never
merged Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of a company, business organization, or one of their operating units is transferred to or consolidated with another entity. They may happen through direct absorpt ...
into official versions of the Blender software.


References


External links

* * * * * * {{Blender Foundation 2006 computer-animated films 2006 animated short films Articles containing video clips Films made using Blender Computer-animated short films Creative Commons-licensed films Dutch animated films Dutch short films Open content short films 2000s English-language films Films released on YouTube Hanging Gardens of Babylon Colossus of Rhodes English-language short films