Official webpage for the project described in my last post.

Hi, a lot of people have shown interest in the project I described in my last post, the goal of the project is to create an opensource movie a bit in the style of Paris je t’aime, where everyone can submit scripts for a five minute segment. If you want to submit a script please send it to adogslifescripts@gmail.com if you want to follow the project and find more information about it, please visit http://bjornih.co.uk/openmovie/ (still very much in development)

A true open-source film

First a short note: I have been fairly busy lately, establishing myself in a new country (UK), as a student and as an independent human being, so I haven’t updated my blog that often lately, but here I go, I’m back, and I have ideas!

We have in recent years seen three splendid examples of open-source animated films from the Blender Institute. The concept behind opensource films is in theory the same as the concept behind opensource software, but is it really?
One of the greatest things about the idea behind opensource software as I see it is that everyone can participate in the development by working on the source-code. People from all over the world come together to create something useful and innovative together. Using the 3d software Blender as an example, the headquarters of the administration is based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, plenty of the users are based in the US and all over the globe. My reason for mentioning the US is that one of the developers we see the greatest results from is based in Cuba, a country embargoed by US law. This tells me that the openness of opensource software can break down borders, even embargoed borders, opensource software thus promotes as I see it a global peaceful and cooperative society where every one can contribute equally no matter where they are from, their social or economical background, international laws, wars and conflict. Thus I say, the most open part of the Opensource Software movement is the cooperation between people, and everyones right to participate.
Unfortunately this does not currently apply to the opensource films. The process of creating films are drastically different from the process of creating software. Software creation is based on source-code, which is easily shared, copied and worked on over the network, movies are based on so many different things, and none of them seem to be easy to cooperate online on, many have tried, and many have failed to work together on online movies, so to figure out how to create a truly opensource movie which, in addition to the common criteria for opensource movies also involve the cooperation within the community surrounding the movie. So I ask myself what is the source-code of a movie, and how can people work together on it without creating chaos. Naturally all movies are based on a script, which is what I find to be the closest we come in films to the source-code. In most cases the script is written by one or two authors, making the creative process pretty straightforward, he or she writes a story, it’s as simple as that (it’s not really that easy, but the concept of it in this context is).
So how can more people work together on the script for a film without everything going chaotic? Well, I draw my inspiration once again from the development of Blender, in addition to the development of the movie Paris je t’aime. The features of Blender is, as I understand it, developed through source-code committed to the SVN-trunk by the developers. Meaning no single developer, with the exception of the administrators (Ton Rosendaal) works on the entire code, but everyone works on their own small part. The best things committed to the SVN is added to the official code of Blender. So what does this have to do with Paris je t’aime? Well, the movie consists of 20 shorter segments, all with different stories working together to tell a larger story about Paris, the people in the city and their relationships. So my idea is that everyone should be able to commit their segments to a script for a full movie, the best scripts, selected by the administration will be committed to the final movie. The administration should set an overall theme for the film, then people from everywhere, no matter what their background is should be able to commit short, but complete segments under that theme. After the complete script is put together it’s up to the administration to figure out how to produce the entire movie. There are many ways to involve the larger community depending on the script, but for concept designs, for animations, music et cetera I certainly see ways of involving a larger community throughout the process.

So let’s do it!

I hereby challenge you all to take part in what I see as the most open movie-project of all time. I challenge you to write short stories. I challenge you to create a basis for scripts for segments of approximately five minutes per story. The overall theme will be “A dogs life – stories about the relationship between man and dog” this theme will hopefully give us the opportunity to tell an overall story about cultural differences globally. I also challenge you all to spread the word of this project, I challenge teachers to get their students to write, I challenge you all, and if we get this right I truly believe we can create history. I believe we can come together and work towards a common goal. May our differences strengthen us, and may that strength be used to reach a goal of common understanding crossing the borders of the world.

Please send your scripts as e-mails (no attachments, put all the text in the main mail-box) to: adogslifescripts@gmail.com i will try to reply to all emails, if you have any questions please email them as well, or simply post a comment below. All writers who make it to the film or in any other way gets published by this production will get propperly credited (that will also be stated in the final license of the film)

I am currently working to set up an official web-page where I will add a production-blog and a forum for collaboration and the community I hope to build around this project, as of now the project will have to live here on my personal blog, on the facebook-page and hopefully within the opensource society.

In addition to stories some of the first things we will need to be able to produce this film is funding, if anyone has any ideas, experience or ways they want to help me whit this please contact me. We should probably try to set up a finance team which can work on the specific issue of raising and managing funds for this project, so if anyone is interested in joining such a team please get in touch.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Dogs-Life-an-opensource-movie-project/154645931246761?v=wall here is the official facebook-page for the movie-project.

Thank you very much,

Bjørn Ihler

One week left!

Just a quickie, Loads of stuff has been going on over the summer, I’ll post about that later (politics, music, shows, festivals, regular work, arts and everything) But lately my mind has been at LIPA and Liverpool, I’m moving there to study in a week, that’s a short time! and I have a lot of stuff I need to sort out before going there, so please bear with me, I’ll update soon =)

Javaland

A friend of mine sent me this really cool video, it’s subtitled in english because it’s in norwegian, but that souldn’t be a problem, right?

Microsoft Vs Java Trailer – Watch more Funny Videos

If anyone can tell me how to embed videos into wordpress they would get my greatest gratitude!

The amazing allmighty LuxRender

Luxo is probably one of the most famous computer-animated lamps of all time, from the early era of Pixars siggraph-demonstrations of computer graphics used in film (it had never been done before). LuxRender on the other hand is what makes amazing movies, like those made by pixar, dreamworks and the other studios visible to the eye. It’s a renderer. But not only is it a renderer, it is open-source and free for all to download and use. And the rendered results from it are amazing.
Some of the most prominent features of this render-software is that it uses physically based rendering, it has the capability of spectral rendering, DoF and motion blur is of course an option and it has some amazing light-simulation capabilities. It can run on all platforms, OsX, Windows, Linux et cetera, it has a system for virtual film giving you a photographic quality to your pictures.
The best thing about this renderer is that it is opensource and in constant development, and one of the really good things about that is that it works very well with Blender3d. Below is a video of how LuxRender works and its new real-time integration with Blender=D

SmallLuxGPU v1.6 (OpenCL) from David Bucciarelli on Vimeo.

http://www.luxrender.net/

Hurrah! It’s Friday=)

Friday marks the end of the working week and I will chill and watch something fun. Today I found these videos on the interweb giving useful information on animation and being fun/entertaining at the same time=)

Mr. Tuba!

and the making of…

http://www.caju.nu/blog/making-of-pizzaria-atlantico

Working to get traffic messages out on the social media.

I am at the moment working for Statens Vegvesen, the traffic and transportation department in Norway to bring traffic messages out to the common man. We have done this for years using conventional media like radio and tv and have in later years also embraced the web-mediums. Well embraced might be a word too strong. At least we have a rrs-feed with traffic messages, so what I am doing today is to try and figure out a cool way to embed this rss feed into your facebook profile-page. There are several ways in which you can do this, most of them adds a tab to your page saying RSS/Blog or something like that giving boring old rss feeds which does not please the eye, so my attempt is to create a easily accsessable and eye-pleasing widget you can have on the front of your profile giving you and your friends easy access to traffic messages using social media=)

Here is a link for the widget I’ve got this far. Now the question is how to implement it into facebook in the best possible way?

5D mark II

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of borrowing the Canon 5D mark II from a friend. My original goal from borrowing it was to use it in a interview with the father of the Norwegian Prime Minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg for the Labour Youth League in Norway. Anyways after borrowing the camera for that day I took the liberty of asking if I could keep it over the weekend and got a chance to properly test it, and I must say I am amazed. The optics I used could have been better, a broken sigma zoom-lens, but overall the experience of the camera itself was great. The greates problem I encountered was when shooting video in HD 25fps. I used a 4GB card with low specs, so I was unable to record anything due to the save-rate from the cameras internal-memory to the cf-card. I therefore bought a new and better card, so that I could shoot for 24 minutes at full resolution, getting superb image quality with the full-size sensor. With the old card I had to shoot in VGA, so the interviews are in that format, this created quite a lot of the moiré-effect, but that was also the shirt of the subject for the interviews fault. Over all I was very happy with the camera, and I plan on buying one for myself.

Hello world!

Hello world! seems to be a suitable name for this first post on my blog/website, it is my way of saying hello to the world and telling you about my projects and interests. So by now you probably are interested in what I think I can provide in the already overflown world of blogging. What I can do is to tell you about my interests and projects and about projects I find interesting online. So what do I do and what do I find interesting?

Well, I have for some considerable time (taking my age into consideration) been working with computer graphics and digital and print media. I have been animating for as long as I have owned a digital still-camera (about 11 years now) and after starting off with stop-motion I moved over to CGI from which I have gained a lot. I have learnt both about programming and general computing as well as visual arts and animation from working with CGI over the last few years. Among notable events in my history as a computer artist is when I built and programmed a 3d-scanner generating pretty neat point-clouds. I also founded the norwegian blender society, now being hosted at http://www.blender3d.no

I am also interested in politics, having been vice president of the Berg Model United Nations society, president and staffer at MUN conferences to gain knowledge within the field of international politics. I was the founding president of the student council at Bjørnholt VGS, where I also had the opportunity to gain some experience in event-management through open days and the founding of what today is known as Bjørnholtaksjonen, a humanitarian action giving youth in Oslo the opportunity to help kids around the world through fundraising for the red-cross.

So what is the goal of this blog? Well first of all this is a post about the past. My blog will hopefully be directed more towards the future with aspects from the future of computing, graphics, my projects, my ideas within all fields, some art, some design, some politics, some broadcasting experiences, some photography, some music, some politics. In other words, a blog about me, what I am interested in, what you are interested in as a reader and things which might make me more interesting to you;-)

So with a word-count of about 400 words, which is about half of a standard IB essay or 1/10 of an extended essay, I post this first post to my blog, my name is Bjørn Ihler, it’s a pleasure having you as a reader, hope you enjoy it=)