Julius writes, "With people like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backing them up, the Blender Foundation's first full feature length film looks like one of those things that's just bound to happen by itself. Except right now it isn't. Having successfully collected over $630 000 in funding from over 3500 individual pledgers (setting a new world record for animated film), Project Gooseberry needs more to become what it promises to be — a historic open content film production."
I pledged.
Chairman and producer Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation said: 'Though we're obviously extremely happy to have already reached so many people, we need many more to take part as animation is one of the most expensive art forms in existence. We've definitely set a difficult target for ourselves. Gooseberry is about challenging a whole bunch of production and film related cant-do's, especially exploring 100% open production, keeping ownership entirely in the hands of the makers and releasing the whole film under Creative Commons. The message is definitely not simple – that's why we still struggle getting connected to 1000s of more potential supporters.'
Summarising the production:
– Subscription based crowd-funding: crowd-funding has degraded to a product presale platform, we have an alternative.
– Open Production: the audience will get in direct contact with the makers
– Occupy Hollywood: the makers are back in control and own the film – and will benefit from the profits
– Creative Commons bizz: release and share everything, yet find a way to make a living with it
– Open Source is In-house Software: make software as a way of working together, don't copy the commercial product life cycle model
Project Gooseberry is all of that, and more – it's also going to be a totally amazing high quality theater-ready feature animation movie!
