On Thursday I visited beloved Amsterdam with Mirco for premiere of Big Buck Bunny [1].

Big Buck Bunny is the second short animation project of the blender institute formed by Ton Roosendaal. Check the trailer below.
Really interesting about the project is, that (almost) everything is done with open source software, blender [2], and the finished short as well as the assets will be published under creative commons licensing.

The short is well done, has a nice Pixar kind of look. The story is amusing, the characters sweet and detailed. I liked the animation much better than in the processor. Overall the effort has paid for the crew.

Although this project is exemplary for the open source / creative commons scene Ton still would love to have other open source projects become more active. For example he said, that they had to make the final 5.1 surround mix without open source software. Also I asked if such projects could be possible with live action films but the only editing solution called Cinelerra [3] doesn’t seem so stable and production proof as I would need it.

Although I love open source software I am often tied to commercial applications due to stability and requirements. Blender sure does not count in that matter anymore, but for editing or standalone compositing, DTP and others we still depend on commercial applications.

But that is not the end of the story. We met Jon Phillips from creative commons [4] and he really got me interested in their licensing model. It can be used really analogous to the thoughts of Don Tapscott about changing markets. You don’t actually give away your copyright (which is not possible anyway). Creative commons is a smart licensing structure which “works on top of copyright", said Jon.
All you do is make clear rights that the commonalty have to use or share your work. Because of the often confusing situation on the web this makes your life easier.
You can use it as part of your marketing strategy while still preserving rights you need for licensing when contacting the traditional markets in production, like DVD distibution, TV-Licensing, Festival screenings etc. You name the rules.
Definitely something I will look into.

[1] Big Buck Bunny (bigbuckbunny.org)
[2] Blender 3D Software (blender.org)
[3] Cinelerra Video Editing (heroinewarrior.com)
[4] Creative Commons (creativecommons.org)