More updates on the production:

1. Development roadmap page added. This is not the final page, but based on the notes I’ve made during the workshop last week.
2. Six month planning has been added. Oh yes, that does resemble last time! Note that horrible timing of the Siggraph festival deadline again…
3. Arno Kroner, trainer at Disney Feature Animation, teaching at Woodbury University and showrunner of Siggraph ’s FJORG agreed on coming to Amsterdam to organize our first week. He’s planning to do a full week workshop about all aspects of visual storytelling, storyboarding, layout, scene planning and acting. He’s also helping us now as script consultant.
4. William Reynish came over to Amsterdam yesterday to get the full briefing, and of course we had to check on him (and he on us!). This went all great, he’s a funny guy even! Welcome to the team dude!

Time keeps flying, and then it’s suddenly thursday… and still no workshop overview post! Of course I blame this to Andy and Bassam, who are distracting me in the offices while working on recording their training video (dvd) project. You don’t want to know how difficult it is get video/audio recorded and edited in Open Source… but that’s for another time to complain!

The workshop week has resulted in a lot of useful material. I’ve got many pages of notes here to work out still… about the script, Blender features, the studio pipeline and the production planning. All of this will become separate pages (and blog posts here) during the next few days.

A couple of real news items I do want to discuss right now though.

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The workshop is over, and one of the many things we decided during the workshop was that we should be more active on our blog. Thus here I am, writing a blog entry.

I’ll leave the official stuff to Ton, but my impressions during the workshop have been consistently good: this will be a cool project with awesome results. We might have to pull a few all-nighters, but we’ll make it happen.

I feel great about everyone on the team. We all seem to get along really well. The only problem is that there’s so much talent here that—honestly—I feel a rather intimidated! I hope I can live up to the abilities of the rest of the team.

The studio here is really nice, so if we pull some all-nighters, I don’t think I’ll mind so much. We have a nice huge room where all the workstations will go. The lighting is calm and pretty. The seats are comfortable. We have a great location looking out over the canal. We even have a kitchen! It’s great.

All-in-all I’m very excited to start working on Peach in October. It will be a lot of hard work, and it will be fun.

Wish us luck!

Nathan Vegdahl

For your entertainment we installed a small temporary webcam in the Blender Institute. We’re not currently working in front of the computers the whole time, there’re lots of discussions and meetings going on. But maybe if you look close you can see a few familiar faces popping up!

The five Peach artists and one of the developers have arrived in Amsterdam for a week of preproduction work in Amsterdam. (We’re almost complete, only Campbell still is crock hunting in Northern Australia!). In this picture you can see Andy, Lyubomir, Enrico, Sacha, Nathan and Brecht discussing story concept drawings. Also check the media gallery for more shots of the team. If you watch closely you can even notice already where our concept is heading at…

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Hey everyone.

I’ve done a little animation test using Bassam’s Mancandy rig. This is part of a little experiment for community participation (more on that in a second).

Click the the image to view the animation.

You will probably notice a couple of things about it:

1. It’s a cheap rip-off of this Pixar animation.
2. It’s stiff and lacks life, sometimes even pausing completely.

Let us ignore the first point for the sake of my reputation, and simply focus on the second.

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As for the previous Open Movie, we depend on your help to be able to realize this project! You can do that by purchasing the DVD edition of Peach in advance. Our target is to get at least 1000 DVDs sold before the start of the project, october 1st.

Everyone who orders and pays the DVD before october 1st will get a discount and his/her name credited in the movie credit roll!

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Here’s a quick tour in the very cool office where we’ll make the Peach Open Movie. Most of it is undecorated and unfurnished still. But, we keep that wallpaper!

Hi everyone!

And here’s the start of the official portal for project Peach (Furry & Funny), where we will update everyone about our progress, discuss ideas, ask for feedback, and so on.
Information about how to cooperate online will be added here too, but probably not until after the pre-production workshop end of august.
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