Join us for episode 23 of CGCast as we dive deep into the making of "Elephant's Dream," an ambitious open-source animated film spearheaded by Basam Kurdali and the Blender community. Basam shares insights into the project's origins, the challenges faced
during production, and the creative vision behind crafting an open-ended, poetic narrative. From the initial brainstorming sessions to the intense final push, hear about the team's journey, including their unique workflow blending story development
with rapid prototyping through animatics. Discover how they leveraged Blender's capabilities to push the boundaries of open-source software and explore the future plans for similar projects. This episode is packed with inspiration for aspiring animators
and a fascinating look at collaborative, no-budget filmmaking.
Welcome everybody to the 23rd episode of CGCast.
Today I have Bassam Krudali.
He worked on the Blender open source project,
which was Elephant Dream.
So Bassam, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hi, yes. Thank you for having me.
Bassam Krudali.
I was the director of Elephant's Dreams.
And prior to that, I've been doing some animations
and still images and things like that in the 3D software Bl
ender for a while.
I was actually an electrical engineer by training,
and I started doing CG as a hobby almost about many years
ago, actually.
And since about a year, I have been doing just CG
and have sort of left the electrical engineering behind.
So how did you get into CG?
Well, I've always been interested in computer graphics for
almost as long as I can remember.
Also from seeing old movies and maybe the first CG movie I
'm aware of having seen is Disney's Tron,
which I was quite taken with the look off, like a lot of
people, I think, at the time.
And I didn't really seriously consider it as a career for a
long time.
However, and it was only since more recently that I started
thinking of that as a viable thing for me.
That's about it, really.
That's pretty cool. We all start differently.
Can you tell us about the Elephant's Dream project? How did
that come about?
I think the initial idea for doing a project like that came
from Tom Tan, Rosendale.
He's the main developer behind Blender, and he acted as
producer on the project.
In the history of Blender, it had been the tool and in-
house software for an animation company in Europe
during the time when it was closed Source.
And during that time, there was a close-knit connection
between the artists and the developers who worked in the
same company.
And so it was a very quick feedback for them.
Since it's been open source, and it's been some time since
that period,
Tan had the desire to do a multi-tiered project where he
could both test and improve the software
to the level where it could do a production in this year,
in the 2000s, as opposed to the 90s.
And that he could have this kind of close loop feedback
with the artists to improve the software to that level,
test it.
And that was kind of the development idea behind the movie.
And also, on a side note, to kind of show people what Bl
ender and other open source software is capable of today.
The Movie can be a history or a done project.
For the artists, we had maybe slightly different goals
because our goal was more to make the movie
as opposed to develop the software, for instance.
And so we had a more creative aspect to it.
It's pretty much the dream of most of the team
to be able to work on a project like this,
where you get to make a short CG movie
and have pretty good creative control over what goes in it.
And fortunately, the way the project was structured,
we each had a great deal of say in what we did.
And that was important for us too,
because it was an opportunity for us to grow artistically
and to explore the kind of things that we wanted to do in a
movie.
We hope the result justifies that.
I think you guys did pretty well.
But some people were kind of complaining about the story,
that it was a bit weird.
What do you have to say about that?
Me personally, I found it was pretty interesting.
The story was okay for me.
It wasn't my type, but I think there was good effort was
put.
You get A for effort.
So what do you have to say about that, that some people
didn't like the story?
Well, I mean, there are many levels that I can answer that.
I think there are many reactions to the story, actually.
It's a bit, you can generalize them in those terms that
people said that.
But people did say they had some more specific criticisms
about it.
There were those people, of course, who would have
preferred a totally different kind of story
that fits in with Hollywood production or something of that
kind.
For those people, I mean, I can't do to say, I mean, people
have different ideas.
It can be an action movie or a romantic movie, different
audiences each time.
We chose to do something more open-ended and poetic
rather than doing a sort of a direct comedy or action movie
or something like that, a genre movie maybe.
So the story isn't as easily recognizable,
but we felt this was a good choice.
One, because it was the type of story
that we were mostly more interested in making
and also because it is the kind of approach that really
fits an open movie better.
I mean, if we did something really specific and concrete,
some kind of very instantly recognizable cops and robbers
story or something like that,
it would have been maybe more immediately graspable by
people,
but we felt like it would be less expandable.
And since this is an open movie, we felt that it would be
good to have a story that encourages people to think and
have their own personal takes on it.
And that ambiguity is not a bad thing, but a good thing,
since it allows people more freedom of exploring it and
exploring their own meanings in it.
That isn't to say that we had not our own motivations and
meanings behind it.
We talked about some of those on the making of, on the DVD.
But we did actually think out what we did very carefully
while keeping it open at the same time.
So oftentimes we just didn't supply that final piece of the
puzzle
which would let you say, aha, for sure this is what is
going on.
We withheld it on purpose to keep that open feeling to it
and to give the movie more of a feeling than just a direct.
to encourage people who were going to do their own personal
versions of the movie or their takes on it,
that they could go in a direction that they wanted and not
feel constrained by something that we had put into the
story
or the characters that they would have to follow.
On the other hand, there are people who had criticisms more
about specifics in the story and the writing.
And for those people, I would have to say that this is our
first movie of this type.
And obviously, we couldn't get it perfect.
And we also had to work under a certain deal of pressure.
We had a pretty short deadline to work in.
And as is usual with any production, we had our own special
problems.
For instance, we had really wanted to start our six-month
production period with a completed script.
Unfortunately, our first script writer quit.
And when we started production, we didn't have a script.
And we had to find another script writer instead, which we
did maybe a couple of weeks into production.
And then we got into a cycle of nailing down the script and
the story.
during the period where we were actually supposed to be
working in production already.
And so we did what we could to prepare,
and we made lots of animatic versions of the movie
to sort of test the various scripts that were coming at us
from the writer,
who was also more of a playwright than a writer for movies
and animations.
and so he tended to make things that had lots and lots of
dialogue
that would be impractical to do for an animated movie,
especially to do so much lip sync.
And so in the end, we also had to cut a lot from that.
That evolution resulted in the movie as it is now.
And so it had some compromise in it definitely
because we had to do things that were re-analyzable in the
time that we had left,
as opposed to do everything exactly as we might have wanted
it to do.
So of that initial six-month plan, we ended up using seven
months.
So we extended the month.
But the first three months were sort of a pre-production
period,
which involved doing some character and set designs,
but also doing lots of animatics and a lot of story
development.
And we had to really work fast over the next four months
and cut out some more ambitious concepts so we could
actually realize the rest of the actual movie that you see
in the end.
So that's fair enough.
Wow.
That sounds like you guys really worked hard.
Yeah, we had a fair amount of long hours we put in.
At the beginning of the movie, we were putting in already
long hours
because even making animatics can be a lot of work.
So we were putting in like maybe 12 hours, 15 hours a day.
And we had given up weekends pretty much.
And towards the end of the project, things got completely
insane.
And we were working, you know, maybe till like 4 a.m.
sometimes.
I think some people went through a few sleepless nights,
actually, towards the very end,
where our deadline was rapidly approaching us,
and we had to just finish rendering the movie so we could
actually show it.
So it was a very tight production in the sense of having
just barely enough time to finish.
I know, it sounds intense.
Did you guys work together, like in actual physical?
We worked together.
We did a workshop period in July where we came in for a
week and met and talked about the movie for the first time.
And then we worked a little bit on the net until September.
And from September onward was our production period.
And we did that all in the Montevideo Media Arts Institute.
We had a big room with workstations as a studio.
And we worked in that room pretty much the whole time in
Amsterdam.
That's cool.
Can you explain, like, briefly, like, the steps?
So you went story, then storyboard, animatic, and then
modeling, animating, or what?
Yeah, well, we started out with some story concepts.
We had about maybe four different story concepts.
They were very rough ideas.
They weren't really like fleshed out stories.
It's more like sort of the backbones of a story.
So one of them was two guys in a machine.
That's what we picked.
We also had this more cops and robbers idea,
but also had kind of an open-ended element,
but was also too complicated.
And we had a few others.
And we picked this two guys in a machine idea.
And we kind of brainstormed about it for a long time.
We defined some sort of ideas that we wanted to talk about,
like the relationship between perception and reality
and kind of like the conflict of ideas that happens between
people.
We also kind of worked out this backstory for our
characters
and some scenes that we wanted to see in the final movie
for sort of walking and dancing on these keys
that are coming up from an abyss was a very early idea.
I think that that happened maybe in July or something like
that,
that we wanted that scene in there.
Then we wanted to get a, you know,
we kind of had some meetings with our first screenwriter
and the idea was to give them all our ideas
and they would go off and they had kind of the bare bones
of the story
and they would flesh it out basically and write a script
for us.
That didn't happen exactly that way.
But when we came back in September,
we had enough information about what we wanted to do
that we could actually do the character designs,
which we started working on at the same time
that we found another screenwriter who started working on
the script.
And then we just kept on doing the dialogues with him
until we got a final script.
We had several versions in the middle.
And each version of the script that we got that was a
possibility,
we did an animatic.
So we actually skipped storyboarding,
and we did 3D animatics right away.
And each animatic was, depending on which one we did, maybe
five to seven minutes long.
So it was running a little bit faster than the actual movie
.
And then we would watch it and kind of evaluate it and see
what worked and what didn't work.
And so we did a very rough one.
Then we did another really long one, which was what we
thought was going to be the final script.
But then we watched that animatic and we kind of saw that a
lot of the ideas that were in the script weren't actually
working visually at all.
And so we had this intense period, four or five days, but
it was very rough on us psychologically because, you know,
we thought we were ready to start production, but we weren
't.
And we basically cut down a lot of ideas and scenes from
that script.
And we kind of tried to boil down the movie to its,
the story to its essentials that we could actually show.
And we made a very cut down version of the script.
And then we made our final animatic based on that.
And that's what we had for reference the whole time we were
shooting the movie.
And around that time also we did the voice recordings.
So we actually had the sound to the dialogue.
And that also helps us structure it.
Then for the rest of the movie we worked on a per scene
basis.
So we did each scene pretty much in order.
As you see in the movie.
And we had teams working on modeling and animation.
almost at the same time.
The characters were modeled
and almost completely rigged
when we started that phase,
but we actually continued to develop the character rigs
until halfway through the animation process.
And so we often would have to go back
to our old scenes that we worked in
and drop in the new rigs of the new characters
so we can do some more subtle animation
and facial animation
that we didn't do the first run through.
and because we didn't know each other when we first started
working we also had an adjustment
period where the team members kind of figured out what the
right roles were then for were exactly
for each person and so it ended up that some people did
sort of modeling and animation and
some people did mostly modeling and texturing and some
people did mostly animation but we only kind
of figured that out after about maybe two weeks of
production that okay this person really you
know doesn't want to do modeling too much but he's a great
animator and so that's what he's going to
do for the rest of the project and so on so forth and once
we got that figured out that was about
maybe two scenes into the movie things started to go really
smooth and um and um almost you know
you could just depend on things being there when you wanted
them to be and and it started to click
really well.
That sounds fun.
Can you tell us like what were the best and the worst
experiences during the entire process?
Well, I think I just spoke about the worst experience.
It was probably for me at least.
Describe.
Yes.
It was when we watched the penultimate animatic and had
this sinking feeling.
I think everyone had it watching it, that there was no way
we were going to make this movie that we were watching,
that, you know, what we thought was the right path wasn't.
And we watched it. And then I said, I think I said, was the
first to say at least that this isn't going to work.
We can't actually make this particular movie. And everyone
kind of had this awful look on their face.
and we had this highly pressured,
I think me and Ton met over the weekend after that
and just like had the script with us
and kept on cutting and revising.
And it felt like, it felt weirdly impossible at the time.
It was a very kind of sobering period for me.
The best period is harder to nail down.
I think I had a lot of really,
I think we all had a lot of times during the project.
so it's hard to say which one was the best.
Sometimes just working on some scenes that went really well
just was a very good feeling.
Like I think when we were doing the elevator,
the fifth scene in the movie where the cats are giving up
this strange elevator
and it just seemed like everything was coming together
really well
compared to the rest of the project
because it was kind of the first time things clicked.
And it probably also was far enough away from the end
that we didn't have that final deadline yet.
And that was great.
And then finishing the movie,
watching it on the big screen with Amir
was a fantastic experience.
Do you know if anybody has already started
using the open source materials,
like the models or anything,
to make a movie based out of the stuff you provided?
Well, I don't know that anyone's so far
actually gone to the lengths of reanimating
or going into the actual 3D production files
and trying to do a whole movie with them.
A lot of people are using those files
as a kind of learning material for them right now
because it's an opportunity for them to get their hands on
fully rigged characters
that are fairly complex and scene setups and compositing
setups
that they just wouldn't have had before.
For instance, I mean, I'm sure most of CGCast's audience
knows that,
for instance, rigging isn't necessarily the most...
I mean, you know, faced with a 3D application and a
character and asked to rig it, it isn't right away obvious
what you're supposed to do.
And certainly there are tools that make that easier.
Blender's tools, while they're capable, are probably not
the most intuitive you can find for that task.
And so a lot of people who would like to use the software
probably would just not have known where to start.
And having this resource to pick apart can be really good
for people to have.
So I think that's one area where it's really what was used.
Some people have done remixes of the movie where they take
their video and supply their own audio and recut it.
There were a couple of music video type things that were
done with that.
They were both spoofs of songs.
I think one was the spoof of a Numa Numa song.
I don't know if you saw that.
And another one was, it was called My PC is Broken or
something like that.
And Emo was supposed to be asking Pruke to fix his broken
PC.
And someone did a neck neutrality song that they cut with
the video from the movie.
And there were also people are doing dubs in other
languages.
Yeah, I think there's an Italian dub and a French dub
already, or at least in the works.
I'm not sure. There might be more, actually.
It would be nice to see someone redo the lip sync, at least
, for some of these dubs.
Because, I mean, that would be cool, you know, just to have
it synced up right to other languages that it's in.
Because they have that opportunity, at least.
That's true.
So, yeah.
Sometimes when people, like, you know, get too in-depth
into why they didn't like the movie,
I feel like saying to them, why don't you just fix it?
You know, just make your own version that you really like.
I'd like that.
Yeah, I would love to see people do that too and make their
own versions.
Do you guys plan on making another movie?
Yes.
I think, I mean, in a general way, for sure.
I don't think any of us plan on not doing something else
for the future.
I know Andy's working on a short that he's doing by himself
right now, for instance.
He's the art director from the movie.
I've got a project that I'm working on as well
that I actually had started before this one.
And I'm working on finishing it.
I've been reworking the script actually now
that I've had this experience
and know some things that can go wrong.
But there is also some tentative ideas
to do some future Project Orange
or maybe it would have a different name at that point.
But, you know, another open movie project
or some people are even talking about
doing an open game project
because Blender has a built-in game engine as well.
And so I think we'll see something else in the future,
but it probably won't be for another six months
to a year from now that, you know,
We kind of see that because there's a lot of pre-planning
and things like that that have to take place.
And so it will be a while before we actually see the
results of that.
And therefore, I don't know exactly what form they'll take
either.
Okay. I want to know, how was the team assembles?
Excuse me?
How was the team assemble? Did you just post on the
internet that you're looking for people or what?
Well, I think the first step was getting the really first
team together.
And I think that was Ton's initiative.
He knew me and he knew Andy as being two RSTU's Blender who
were good in two specific regions.
Andy is really good at making images.
He's very good at texturing, very good at composition and
rendering and lighting.
And he's very hardworking and productive.
And I had started using actually 3D Studio Max and then
Animation Master before I started using Blender.
And so I had kind of the experience of animation and rig
ging in other software before I came to try to apply it to
Blender.
And I think as a result, I had some kind of head start on
some of the other people using the program.
And so I was able to do animations and Blender fairly early
.
And so he saw that he had at least, you know, the
beginnings of a core team.
He had one animator and one, you know, art modeler and
texture and lighter.
And he asked us to find the rest of the team.
And so kind of the three of us, we put out an announcement
on the Blender website
saying that we were looking for artists who use Blender to
work in this open movie project.
And people sent in application forms.
And much like there's CG Talk, Blender has a software-
specific forum.
It's a good place to see what people are capable of doing
and what they've done in the past
and kind of what the speed of their output is.
So we actually had a fair idea about 80% of our applicants
even before we got their applications.
And so we got a bunch of applications in
and we got so many in that we had to reject a lot actually.
But we narrowed it down that we wanted people
who'd already done at least one short animated production
before so they had some experience doing things like that
and um we also um just kind of evaluated
based on their portfolios that they sent in same as
probably most companies i mean you just look
at the demo reels and uh decided that you know these people
would probably make a good team
and uh and uh that was it basically uh the the last person
we found was the technical director
was Tony Alatalo.
We actually didn't hire him until the July workshop.
And he actually wasn't there at the beginning of that
workshop.
And when we made that decision,
he flew down from Finland and joined us for the rest of the
week.
And that was the completion of the team.
Wow, nothing about that project sounded easy.
I'm not sure if you heard that a while ago,
but for some reason there's fireworks going on outside
and I'm not really sure why.
I can hear it, actually.
I was wondering what that was.
Yeah, I don't know why there's fireworks,
but I'll check it out after.
I hope it's not a problem for your audio.
No, I just did not expect it at all today.
I don't know what's going on today.
No idea.
Anyways, I think we can continue.
So about you personally, what's your future plans?
Right now, at the present.
I'm working, and I think some of the other team members
might be helping with this,
on a workbook for the project.
It's the Elephant's Dream workbook that is kind of a
combination of a making-of story
and also a technical manual, not for Blender,
but for how we actually made the movie.
And it can work as maybe a companion to the production
files,
especially for those people who are interested in using
those files
for learning purposes or making their own productions
or maybe just people who are curious about the history of
the project.
I'm also trying to do something similar to that project
here in the US,
but on a slightly smaller scale, at least at first.
So I've got basically a website out,
but I plan on doing sort of a mixture of freelance and
Creative Commons work.
The website's called freefactory.org,
and basically I plan on trying to self-fund,
and maybe through some donations, if I can get them,
fund the making of my next movie project,
which is also a short movie in this case,
perhaps a little bit shorter than Elephant's Dream,
but with kind of a different look and a different story
behind it.
It's actually similar or inspired by George Orwell's 1984.
So it might be a little bit depressing, but it'll be fun at
the same time.
Yeah, it's probably fun.
I myself, I want to make a movie.
You guys kind of inspired me.
I want to see if with CG cast, I could use like CG cast a
chrono,
I want to make a short movie.
I kind of have a story idea set up.
Do you have any tips you could give?
Well, personally, I would say it depends a little bit on
the circumstances,
whether you want to do it alone or with other people.
But my main tip, it's not really a tip, is to try to keep
things,
not in terms of the final look, but in terms of the
production needs,
as far as possible.
Because anything you add in, in complexity,
and kind of makes the control of the project really hard.
Maybe another thing is to really be sure about your story
and your script
before you start production at all.
And let's see.
I had some other ideas, but they just flew out of my head.
Yeah, I think it's on firecracker, the fireworks making them
fly away.
Yeah, actually they're pretty loud here on their headphones
.
I would also say that to kind of make the decisions for
what kind of production it's going to be and follow that
path and be realistic about what that means for the
production.
For instance, if you're going to have a budget to make this
movie and you can work on it full-time or a large
substantial amount of part-time, then you can be realistic
about doing it in a shorter period of time.
let's say you have a job or you're going to school and you
can't really afford too much time
because you know you need to eat and make money and stuff
like that uh then it won't be a short
production because you won't be able to work on it
continuously and um whatever it is just make
sure you set yourselves on deadlines so you know you can
know at any point how close you are and
how well you're doing towards finishing it and definitely
do something you enjoy
yeah okay good that's thanks for the advice um my plan was
like to do it during the summer
like i know a lot of people get the summer off it'd be cool
to try and do it during the summer
i've had the story i had the story written down i'm not
sure if i backed it up and my sd card
decided to reformat itself but i'm pretty sure i have a
backup of it backups that's a good thing
yeah i learned that the hard way and i just yeah yeah
continue i was just thinking um from our
project, one thing that was very, very good that we did
early on and was just fantastic idea,
probably without it, we'd not would not have finished is
that we had, we had a version control
software for the project, you need to do, even if it's a
one man project, you need to do asset
management, version controlling and backups from the
beginning. That's very, very important,
especially if more than one person is going to work on this
.
It's going to become even more important.
And you don't have to spend a lot of money on this.
We used SVN, which is an open source.
Subversion is the full name for it.
It's an open source version control software,
and it's actually not even designed for graphics.
It is designed for programmers.
It's normally used for software projects,
but it has the capacity of checking in binary files.
And the way it stores the different versions,
it does binary diffing between the versions.
And so the actual repository that sits on a central server
can be actually, because it's diffed and compressed,
it's actually smaller than the individual checkout.
So it's not really giving you a huge hardware requirement.
And it can be backed up.
So you can have a backup of the entire project at all times
.
And that's what we had.
And then the different artists check out,
whether they're on the internet or locally.
I actually spent a few weeks doing the project away from
the studio.
And it was a great because we had this version control
and I could do checkouts every day
and do some files and check them back in.
and everyone had them up to date the moment I did that.
And that really is crucial.
I'm not sure what kind of software is available
for that particular kind of purpose
other than Subversion, CVS would work too.
I think there's a program called Alien Brain.
Yeah, Alien Brain probably does the same thing.
I've never tried it, but there are probably similar things
too.
But yeah, it's very important.
It's easy to not think of that earlier on,
but trust me, you'll be glad you did it.
Yeah, I know.
I've overwritten a scene file by accident
when I was making a short,
and having to reanimate something is not fun.
Yeah, exactly.
Thanks.
So is there any final comments you'd like to give out?
Well, let me think.
Just to sort of stay tuned,
There will be a new project coming from Project Orange
or the new name, an open movie project,
coming out in the future and probably some other cool
things.
And also that me and Andy from the open movie project
are going to be at SIGGRAPH,
as well as the Blender software and some other open source
software
are going to have an open source pavilion on the SIGGRAPH
floor.
We'll be showing the movie.
We'll be demoing the software and just talking to people in
general.
So, you know, it'll be a good place to meet people and
check things out if you want to come down.
I wish I could go, but the trip sounds expensive.
So did you guys enter the movie into a film festival?
We've entered into a few film festivals.
I actually don't know all of them.
We were in Animago for sure.
in Germany
and we've applied to a bunch of other ones
and I actually
honestly don't know
much
I mean I know the ones that I
applied to like I applied to
some that are local here in
Northeast United States
still haven't gotten answers from
those to the animation
show in the US
which I still don't know
what the status of that is
I think there's one in South America that we are actually
in for sure.
And Tan, the producer, has applied to a bunch of festivals
as well.
So it's been entered into festivals,
and we're kind of waiting pretty much to see what happens
with that.
And we're going to enter into some more actually as the
opportunity arises
and before those deadlines happen.
There's a big film festival here that's about to start.
It's the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.
You should check that out if you have time.
Oh, I will.
Are there any shout-outs you want to give to any of the
people who worked on the project?
Yeah, I'd like to say thanks to all of you,
to Andy Grolczyk, Lee Stalzomeni,
Basset Salmula, Tony Allato,
and Mad Eb, Anton Rosendahl, of course.
it was a pleasure working with you all
and I hope I can do it again
thanks for
coming on the show I know
this has been a long thing in the making
but thank you for finally coming on
I think it cut out
thanks
final thing before I go
I would like to tell everybody that
if they would they can join the CGCaps
forum they can post there
and help make the show better
and hopefully there will be no fireworks
next time. Also, if you have
a MySpace, you can add
CGCast
on your MySpace. It's myspace.com
slash CGCast.
And if you're interested in the CGCast movie
project, you can post on the
forum, you can send me an email,
show me what you can do and
what position you want. Right now, it's
me and Ruben
and maybe Alex so far.
I've got the story. I'm still doing
the pre-production, but if you're interested, just let
me know. Bye, everybody.
