Big Buck Bunny is a worthy entry into the rich history of animated violence. An obese, sweet-natured bunny is picked upon by a trio of shady little woodland critters. He meekly endures their cruelty until they cross the line and engender his awesome wrath! The plot is run of the mill, but if classic slaptick and villains getting their comeuppance is something you like, there is plenty to enjoy.
Though anthropomorphic animals and slapstick CG animation aren’t rare, the film is executed at professional levels, and there is one thing unique about the short filmit is open-source. Created using the opensource 3D prog Blender, the Blender Foundation funded 7 artists to come together and work on the film from Oct. ’07 to April ’08, and the support of the Blender community helped make it viable. Support from Sun Microsystems, allowed the team to use Sun’s on-demand computing network to simultaneously render files on the equivalent of hundreds of computers at a time, which is a good thing since they estimate the film used over 50,000 CPU hours in the course of development. As far as viewing goes, you can buy a DVD, stream it on Vimeo or direct download a truly astonishing array of formats including 4 formats of 1080p video, or the whole 200 gig studio backup! A great way to promote Blender I imagine, allowing for young animators to reverse engineer some of the techniques.
Watch or Download at: Big Buck Bunny Website
Jason Sondhi
