Sintel is a short computer animated

Computer animation

Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images....

 film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation

Blender Foundation

The Blender Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for the development of Blender, an open source program for three-dimensional modeling....

. The name comes from the Dutch word sintel, which can mean cinder or ember

Ember

Embers are the glowing, hot coals made of greatly heated wood, coal, or other carbon-based material that remain after, or sometimes precede a fire. Embers can glow very hot, sometimes as hot as the fire which created them...

, as confirmed by Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal is a Dutch software developer. He is known as the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender, as chairman of the Blender Foundation, and for pioneering large scale open-content projects...

 in a blog comment: " “Sintel” is [a] piece of glowing coal or metal. It glows brightly, burns, and then becomes ashes...".

Like the foundation's previous films Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated short film that was produced almost completely using the free software 3D suite Blender . It premiered on March 24, 2006, after about 8 months of work...

and Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny is a short computer animated film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation.Like the foundation's previous film Elephants Dream, the film was made using Blender, a free software application for animation made by the same foundation.-Overview:Work began in October 2007...

, the film was made using Blender

Blender (software)

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...

, a free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 application for animation made by the same foundation.

Overview

Work began in May 2009. The film was officially released on September 27, 2010 at the Netherlands Film Festival. The online release was made available for download on September 30, 2010.

Plot

The film follows a girl named Sintel who is searching for a baby dragon she calls Scales. A flashback reveals that Sintel found Scales with its wing injured and helped care for it, forming a close bond with it. By the time its wing recovered and it was able to fly, Scales was caught by an adult dragon. Sintel has since embarked on a quest to rescue Scales, fending off beasts and warriors along the way. She eventually comes across a cave housing an adult and baby dragon, the latter of which she believes to be Scales. The adult dragon discovers and attacks Sintel, but hesitates to kill her. Sintel slays the dragon, only to recognize the scar on its wing and realize the dragon is an adult Scales, and that she too has aged considerably. Sintel leaves the cave heartbroken, unknowingly followed by Scales's baby.

Announcements

Some sections were displayed on October 25, 2009,
the trailer was made available on May 13, 2010, while an almost-final version of the movie screened at a "pre-premiere" on July 19, 2010. The full movie premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival

Netherlands Film Festival

The Netherlands Film Festival is an annual film festival, held in September and October of each year in the city of Utrecht.During the ten-day festival, all Dutch film productions of the previous year are exhibited. Besides feature films, the program also consists of short subjects, documentary...

 on September 27, 2010, and was officially released online on September 30.

Technical information

Following Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, and Yo Frankie, the short movie is the fourth project created by the Blender Foundation. Sintel was created by the Blender Institute, a division of the Blender Foundation set up specifically to facilitate the creation of open content

Open content

Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

 films and games.

The film was funded by the Blender Foundation, donations from the Blender community, pre-sales of the film's DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 and commercial sponsorship. Both the final product and production data, including animation data, characters and textures are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...

.

Improvements to Blender

As with the previous Blender Open Movie Projects, Blender developers worked extensively to improve the software in accordance with the needs of the movie team. Improvements were made in the user interface, the particle system

Particle system

The term particle system refers to a computer graphics technique to simulate certain fuzzy phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques...

, sculpting, shading, the render pipeline

Rendering (computer graphics)

Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...

, constraints, and smoke simulation. These features were released to the public with Blender v. 2.50 alpha through 2.54 beta.

Video game

A fan made game that was greenlighted by the Blender Team is currently in production and was officially announced on Blenderartists.org on May 12, 2010.

Excerpt from the film

External links

• Sintel Press Release
• Sintel at the Netherlands Film Festival
  Netherlands Film Festival
  The Netherlands Film Festival is an annual film festival, held in September and October of each year in the city of Utrecht.During the ten-day festival, all Dutch film productions of the previous year are exhibited. Besides feature films, the program also consists of short subjects, documentary...