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.
ED is a huge success and I wish you luck for this next stage of After Orange (maybe Orange 2?…).
Anyway, I loved Elephants Dream and am glad I was able to contribute to it, even with just a minor participation.
All my best,
— Rui —
PS: Hoping to see some nice posts from you on the blog 🙂 .
Cheers and thanks for your contribution too! I already spent a while flipping through all the different subtitles to see what they were like. Very cool.
Isn’t the website load lower now ?
I want to see the blog again and have you guys posting a new entry with the statistics on the downloads so far and media coverage that has been done.
— Rui —
Rui, I would have thought it would be ok by now, but apparently it’s not – if not even worse now 🙂 We originally put the temporary page up when the real site caused the server load to go up to around 10-15 (it’s usually around 0.5-2). That helped things for a while, bringing the load back down to normal levels. But now it’s back up to 7 or so, even with the lightweight front page!
I don’t know the exact statistics, and I’m sure we’re going to do a blog post about it when we have the numbers, but as a rough figure, bart estimates that there’s been an average of 150,000 page views per day, for the last 4 days running. A modest estimate of how many people have downloaded it is around 250,000 people.
There are statistics for the bittorrent tracker here: http://jip.cs.vu.nl:6969/ . So far about 42 TERABYTES of ED files have been downloaded via bittorrent.
Its great, it means you are being applauded all over the world.
Anyway, the special /index.php hack to get inside isn’t working as it should, you always get redirected when clicking the links inside it, can you guys allow for access to it again ? At least we could comment a bit, the ones that know this …
Cheerz,
— Rui —
PS: I have the files mirrored on my website too, so, it has 8 more GB of downloads, only from Portuguese folks.
cheers matey!
here’s to world domination by somnolent elephants!
(sipping a beer in belated web release celebration)
-bassam
That reminds me, I still have to get you that stubbie holder… Hmm..
Pardon me, as I am a little confused.
Does the title of the lovely Elephants Dream mean:
1) Elephants can dream.
2) This is a dream of an elephant.
If the title means that indicated in #1, then it is grammatically correct. But if the title means #2, then the grammar of the title is incorrect and confusing.
If it is #2, then the title should be “Elephant’s Dream”.
To me, it makes more sense if the name of video is #2 but I hope the meaning of the title is #1. If the desired name of the video is indeed #2, then the current title is grammatically incorrect. It would be embarrassing to have such a lovely showpiece of your technology where its title contains an obvious 5th grade grammar error.
Some clarification would be appreciated.
Cheers, and keep up the lovely work.
– Alex
Hi Alex, the title is grammatically correct, it’s meant to be “elephants do dream” or “elephants can dream” or even “a dream involving elephants”. The making of documentary (available on the orange site) explains this a bit better 🙂