Elephant's Dream

Well, now that my blog's tenth post celebration is over, I wish to offer my view of Elephant's Dream. It's been all over the internet, and there are plenty of references and reviews. So I finally got around to watching it. It used to be called the Orange Project, and is the first high-quality movie to make the claim to fame to be a open movie (It is actually called The Open Movie Project). By open, I mean that all of the textures and Blender files are free under the Creative Commons Attribution license, and that it was made using all open-source tools (the only exception being MacOS X, which was used on the render farm, -they used Ubuntu for development- and the music synth software.

On to the review.
It was made mainly to show all that OSS tools can make, so I won't be too hard on the plot. But the plot really wasn't that interesting if you don't want to get into some very interesting debates about what it was about. Really, half the fun of it was arguing with my brother on the symbolism of the Machine. But I will summarize it in one sentence: Two men, Proog and Emo, are wandering around a giant machine, Proog trying to convince Emo of the beauty of it, but Emo sees nothing.
It makes a lot more sense if you read the script (Good luck. Wordpad messes the font up), and see that when Proog is saying "And if you look to the right you see", that is the prolog. Everything after that is a flash-back.

Overall Artistic Beauty: 5/5 - Beautiful, a masterpiece.
Character Animation: 3/5 - Sub-par at first, but gradually gets better.
Static CGI: 4.5/5 - Motion blur, textures, etc. are excellent.
Voice Acting: 3/5 - Of reasonable quality, but worse then in most feature films.
Music: 5/5 -Perfect. I really though that is was orchestral for a while.
Plot: 2/5 - This varies. It was very abstract, and requires much thought to extract any sense,
but some (like myself) enjoy it despite it's rather vague nature.
Overall: 3.75/5 - Enjoyable, but only to artists, animators, deep-thinkers, and music lovers.
Did I enjoy it: Yes.
http://www.elephantsdream.org/

Now, YOU, my readers, get to choose the next post: should I a) Try to interpret Elephant's Dream, b) Do the same, boring, thing.