> it’s not driven by revenue
Out of curiosity what or who do you think Blender should be driven by, and what should our fairly meagre and largely voluntary resources be directed toward? Are we going in the right direction when we intend to make full movies?
This is excellent news!
It’s driven by passion of the contributors. Really. The voluntary resources are largely self directed, that’s been proven to work most efficient, dictating what features volunteers should work on has never really worked. Most of the successful development projects have come from the developers, volunteers or not, being themselves excited to work on them.
It’s the same with open movies and this film. The reason it works is because Ton and the artists and developers working on them are very passionate about them, which means they get things done which otherwise would be impossible with such meagre resources.
Of course there is some wiggle room, but you can’t dictate a big change to the overall direction of the existing resources and maintain anywhere near the same momentum.
I’m excited about this project because I know Ton is, which means his reality distortion field will be working at full force to get things done.
>his reality distortion field will be working at full force
Yeah this aspect worries me because although Ton goes after big goals the practical aspects of execution don’t appear to get as much consideration/examination as they ought.
Although I say this is a better idea than recent ones privately I immediately hold fears that this is destined to fall short of where it should but this time impact an outside organisation.
Ton is going to have to work in with and be told what to do by other studios and artist wise this is a leap in scale of organisation I am not sure we are ready for because we haven’t really got into working with/across multiple teams.
Considering Gooseberry it has in my opinion sadly fallen short of content considering the time spent planning it. Indeed even recently it is has been getting chopped and reworked. I don’t think we ever really were able to articulate what we wanted to achieve or were realistic about what could be done and we should have been able to do so building on past experiences.
Incidentally I don’t blame the director or artists for this but this simply cannot happen if BI/BF gets involved in something bigger.
Hah, I was just thinking of editing out that term because I realized it was going to be interpreted in a way different than I meant it. I was referring to the enthusiasm that he can instil on people to go above and beyond.
his reality distortion field will be working at full force
He meant reality distortion field as a super-power, not as Ton suffering from a psychosis…
Yeah, I’d think twice about using the “reality distortion field” to describe people you like. It’s most common use these days is to describe how people like Steve Jobs can make people believe complete twaddle through force of personality. Then again, I suppose that’s better than…
I think the blender community has made some major progress in terms of community; just think - A major announcement like this and no hate posts yet 
maybe we learned something from the gooseberry fiasco after all.
more seriously though, I’m quite exited about the news. I actually hypothesized before Ton brought up the idea; that perhaps the best way to further FOSS would be to set up a commercially successful(by which I mean self sustaining) studio that can hire in house development.
The obvious downfall of the scenario for most large studios is that their development dollars would directly contribute to any competitors using the same software.That’s why a greater vision than monetary profit is necessary to drive such project ,which makes the blender foundation a perfect candidate to experiment with it. Not to mention that they already have the best developers on staff.
As to focus of the project, it seems the Game Developers always feel shorted of attention, but obviously the blender foundation has to choose a focus and if they choose to stick with animation, that’s their decision; anyone is free to start a BGE foundation and develop what they want.
Also, there is basically only one FOSS animation tool: blender, which makes it important for blender to stay good in the area: I could list off a handfull of quite progressive FOSS game engine alternatives to blender, which is a good reason for blender to work on other things like animation and VFX that have no equivalent in the open source world.
This is excellent news, looking forward to further updates.