Big Buck Bunny
I downloaded Big Buck Bunny a few days back, but haven’t paused long enough to really sit down and watch it. On seeing it mentioned today on BoingBoing… I fired it up before heading out to do some errands with Liz. She came over to my computer, and we watched it together, laughing through almost all of it.
I found out that this animation was made using Blender – an application that used to be commercial, but which was then purchased by the open source community and released under the GNU General Public License. Learning that really sort of blew me away. It’s akin to, say, a group of folks bandying together, raising funds, and then purchasing MS Word… and making it free for anyone in the world to use.
Additionally, the animation was released using a Creative Commons license, and all the animation files are available.
Chris has been talking a lot about The Wisdom of Crowds at work, and I really need to get this book and add it to my to-read list. I added it to my Amazon account, but just haven’t pulled the trigger on getting more reading material, as my time hasn’t been too conducive to reading lately. But I’m fairly certain this book is the one Chris keeps referencing, and hearing more projects like Blender and Big Buck Bunny gets my gears going from a “what’s the future look like” angle.
The movie itself is a blast, and really well done. You can find it on YouTube, but I definitely recommend getting a larger version to watch on your computer. They’re big files, but… start the download maybe right before you go to bed. Trust me – it’s a heavy file, but SO worth it. [Via
MeFi and BB].
I’ve heard that the Wisdom of Crowds is good as well, but the book I’ve been obsessively nerding over is Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, written by Clay Shirky. It’s a wonderfully dense treatise on how technology has made it incredibly easy to form groups, to collaborate, and to take collective action outside of traditional organizational frameworks. It captures so many of those floating ideas of how social systems work online and distills them into lucid plain-speak that truly makes you believe we’re living in a time of great change. I’m a believer, anyway, and I think most of us that talk about the social effects of technology inside and outside work would find this book enlightening and applicable. Don’t run out and buy a copy though, because there just might be one in your near future, Felix…In the interest of staying topical, I downloaded a copy of Blender a couple months ago after discovering that they had made it open source and seeing some of the great things people were doing with it (visually speaking, Elephants Dream is pretty great). It’s a super powerful program and has an unbelievably active and interested community that supports it. It would actually be a fantastic example for Shirky to use because it demonstrates the kind of amazing things that can come from a big group of passionate users, some more dedicated and passionate than others, but all adding a little something either by building out the application or increasing value by creating art using the tool.
chris (June 8, 2008 at 11:42 am)