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August 27, 2009
Amsterdam!
I’m in Amsterdam! Arrived last Sunday after about 12 hours in planes and airports, walked a long time with far too much luggage to get to the Blender Institute. Met Ton, got a tour of the studio. It’s much nicer than I expected! Really fantastic space. Space for meeting, space for working, space for eating and sleeping. It’s pretty awesome.
This week we’ve spent meeting and getting acquainted with the team for project Durian. There are currently 7 artists and 2 developers on the project, and everybody seems pretty much awesome! We’ve been talking loosely about the film, about the team roles, about our technical targets, but we’ve also spent a great deal of time discussing story.
Originally the plan was to have a finalized story for Durian by the end of July. However, the story process has been extremely protracted, mainly due to problems communicating and collaborating long-distance with the writer, legendary dutch comic author Martin Lodewijk. Both he and I have been busy, and the back-and-forth between us has been very slow.
I have been given the opportunity to adapt a concept supplied by Martin– to develop it further and expand it to screenplay format. However, since we didn’t meet our end-of-July deadline, we’ve found ourselves without a fully developed story. Members of the team have come up with a number of hypothetical concepts and inklings for the project in discussion with me, and I think many of these ideas have a whole lot of potential. However, it is my task to work within a concept provided by the writer, so at the moment we’re waiting for another concept from Martin. It’s a bit sad not to be able to seriously consider these other great ideas, but I think the discussion has really gotten our creative juices flowing and I’m confident we will settle on a really great story for Durian.
This week has been very exciting, and very stressful/frustrating at the same time. Be sure to follow the progress of the project on the blog: http://durian.blender.org. I plan to keep the more personal ramblings and my feelings about Durian on this personal blog, and the more public updates and presentations on the Durian site… but I’m sure there will be some overlap as well.
I’m crazy excited about the coming months so expect a number of updates!
In other news, work on En Route continues. I probably won’t have much time to touch the edit in the next few weeks, but I’m pretty excited about where it’s going! The vfx work happening in Savannah is picking up speed. Looking forward to posting some renders!
Hi Colin is it okay to put a link on our wiki to your Blender video tutorials? We are trying to get high school teachers and students using Blender in the classroom.
Congratulations on your amazing work. Regards kf
Congratulations, on your trip.
I one day hope to visit the blender institute, in Amsterdam.
Glad to see you are still producing awesome work.
FYI: I am going to put a link to your website on my links page.
Keep up the good work !
We travelled there with our three daughters. We found all informations on amsterdam.info. Amsterdam it is a very beautiful town and the museums are great. But with the exchange rate as it is, we found it very expensive. Some museums were closed for refurbishment, but the views of the canals and hi-lights such as the Anne Frank House and the Artis Zoo (an old-fashioned place with a great array of animals kept in somewhat cramped conditions) are very memorable. The food is awful unless you want to spend a great deal of money and there is a cynical attitude to tourists that is very out of date (e.g. tapas marinaded pork was one slice of fried bacon on 1/2 a bread roll). We stayed in the serviceable but expensive Singel Hotel which was okay but its close proximity to a red light area made going out with the children awkward and there really was nothing charming or liberated about hurrying past the ladies in the windows. The same is true of the legal dope selling ‘coffee houses’. The whole bicycle thing is interesting. It is almost, but not quite, the eco-city of the future. Some cyclists are quite anarchic and we spent a fair bit of time dodging pavement mounted bad-tempered riders. Overall verdict was we were glad we’d been but wouldn’t go again as it feels over priced, out of date and sleazy – not the cutting edge hip family friendly town it’s sold as.
nice movie, sintel