May 30th, 2006 .
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.
May 20th, 2006 .
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.
April 7th, 2006 .
A lot to write, I think I’ll take it bit by bit over the coming weeks. At least for now I’m having a few weeks off after Orange and will have some time write, amidst trying to relax and gather my thoughts and energy. Thankfully, after a lot of blood sweat and tears, we pulled through at the last minute and the premiere was a big success, not to mention lots of fun.
I’m still working on a few final things for the DVD, so hopefully it will ship soon. Continually putting pictures of the event etc. up on flickr so keep an eye on that. But for now, time to clear up an email backlog and enjoy the nice weather here down under 🙂
March 5th, 2006 .
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.