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!
(Check the post below.)
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