Elephants Dream

On May 18th, 2006 a team of six people released a beautiful animation under a creative commons license titled ‘Elephants Dream‘. By May 29th, over 500,000 visitors had downloaded the animation. Over the months that followed remixes of the animation began to appear online. A ‘making of’ video was released by the creators of ‘Elephants Dream’ and is worth a look.

‘Elephants Dream’ is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

The Elephant’s Dream web site features:

• High Definition and standard downloads of the animation
• Background information about the project
• Soundtrack and high resolution image downloads

The animation was created using open source software called Blender.

Blender is [the] open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Budding 3D animators, modelers, and texture designers have a unique opportunity: to purchase a DVD containing the original movie, as well as all of the source materials and original files. The DVD also includes the original script and story boards.