A few days ago, I did a small voice interview which is now available on the Linux Australia Update podcast/internet radio show, talking briefly about Elephants Dream. Thanks, James, for the invitation and for having me on there. Bassam also had a chat with the Linux Link Tech Show, though for a lot longer than I! Jono Bacon and co also did a very positive segment on us on his LugRadio show which was quite fun to hear. Jono is a very nice guy and has been hanging around the Blender community for a while, briefly dropping in to visit us in the studio in Amsterdam last year.

Finally, after more than a week of excitement, elephantsdream.org is back online. I’m still hanging out for some statistics, but at one stage, we were getting 150,000 page views per day. Last week it was estimated that we’d had 300,000 downloads, and I think we probably would have doubled that by now. The Bittorrent tracker alone reports around 80 Terabytes (80,000 GB) transferred through it so far. Very impressive stuff.

The DVDs have made their way through the world, so as promised, Elephants Dream, the fruit of our past 7 months of hard labour has been released freely to the world. Our new site, elephantsdream.org explains it far better than I can now late at night, so all I can say that I’m incredibly pleased, proud and excited to see what happens next. We’ve been getting lots of great media coverage, pummelling our web server, so the new website that I spent the last two weeks redesigning is hidden right now to ease the load. I’d much rather people see our 7 month movie though than a two week website, so that deal is fine by me! You can get through to it anyway using this super secret link ;)

It’s definitely not the end of the journey though, we’re going to keep updating the blog, and I’ve at least got a couple of things I’d like to do, such as making a proper font file from the title font vector artwork. I’m also extremely curious to see what other people get up to, with access to the production files. But for now, I hope to soon be able to put up a bit of a reel containing some breakdowns of the things I worked on during production, among others.

I hope you enjoy watching it and reflecting on it as much as I enjoyed my part in its making.

The other day I dug up a photo taken in Thailand in 2004 that I was talking with the guys about in Amsterdam.

It features me riding an elephant wearing my Blender hat, which just goes to show that all of this movie stuff was pre-destined. :)

Yes, I’m still barely alive. Yes, I haven’t written much here recently. Yes, there are good reasons for that. No, I haven’t left the studio before midnight pretty much for the last three weeks. No, I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a few months now. Yes, coffee is good. Yes, we’re close to finishing.

No, we haven’t finished yet. Yes, Andy and I have to complete texturing (with some help though), lighting, compositing, and rendering 5 of the scenes out of total 8 in the next 2 weeks, twice the amount we just did in the same time period. Yes, we’re still the Blender bug and crash test dummies and it’s very frustrating. No we’re not giving up. Yes, it’s going to be great.

It looks like our Orange project has made it into the voting list for the CG Society Top 20 most influential moments in CG for 2005. We’re sitting there side by side with very humbling things like the VFX for Sin City, King Kong and more, Autodesk acquiring Alias, controversy like the hot coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto, and mundane boredom such as Nvidia releasing some new graphics card (wow, who would have expected that).

Anyway, if you have a CGTalk.com login, (or would like to make one!) here’s the talk thread and the voting form. You can make your own mind up about what to vote for. ;)

Tomorrow I leave for a week-long Project Orange pre-production meeting in Amsterdam, returning back to Sydney on the 12th of July. Thanks to this wonderful thing called the internet, life will go on and I’ll be reachable via email as usual. I’m flying with JAL (on the same plane as fellow blenderhead Lee), stopping in Japan very briefly on the way to Europe.

On the way back I’ll stay three nights in Tokyo, which I’m really excited about! It should be an interesting opportunity to try and brush up on my steadily disappearing Japanese language skills, not to mention fun! Are there any Japanese visitors here with any recommendations for Tokyo?

Well, the Project Orange core team members were released to the public today, and I’m very proud, flattered, surprised, and excited to be one of them! We’ll be working together in Amsterdam between September and March next year, with a pre-production workshop in July.

There’s still a lot I don’t know about it yet, but hopefully I will before too long. I also hope to keep a log of my involvement in the process here too, so stay tuned! My submission for the project application (unfortunately minus some confidential in-production work) is here, if you’re interested.