I want to thank Campbell Barton and the guys from the Blender Institute’s Project Peach for sending Dan and me each a copy of their wonderful movie Big Buck Bunny which will be released online today.

I received my DVD this week and have watched it about a dozen times since. Simply put, this thing rocks! The artistic quality in the design, rendering and the score is amazing. It looks like something from Pixar and the story is on par with that as well. I literally laughed through the whole film when I first saw it (no spoilers here, but you gotta watch through the credits — there’s a very funny little twist at the end). One thing I especially love is the fact that the two DVDs are packed choc full with material: There’s HD versions of the film, the soundtrack, scripts, all the models and tutorials how to use them in Blender and much more. Since everything is licensed under Creative Commons, you are basically free the use all the stuff from the movie to play around with yourself. It’s amazing!

You can get the movie via torrent and directly from the Blender site, but please consider buying the DVDs to support these guys. They have definitely earned it and with all the content you get on the DVDs, it’s worth it as well! The only slight gripe I have about all of this is that the movie is only 10 minutes long. I really hope the guys are considering to expand on these wonderful characters in the future. I am really thankful to them for bringing us this brilliant creation and for the immense service they did to Free Software by doing it.

Update:

Stay tuned for our full review of Big Buck Bunny in Episode 41 of the show.

Dan and I recorded Episode 37 of the show yesterday — and then discovered that we had lost Dan’s side of the recording. Stupid me also forgot to get the analog backup going as well, so we lost it all. This is especially a shame since it seemed to be a really funny recording and I was pretty happy with how the episode turned out. Ah well… Back to the drawing board, I guess. We’ll have a second try at this later in the afternoon.

I mean it is pretty amazing that we made it as far as Episode 37 of the show at all. As I am sure I have mentioned before, we never expected to get this far when we started doing the show (not with more than maybe twenty people listening anyway, that is). We may be a bit slow as far as lead time is concerned — our gap between recording and releasing seemed to have become a bit hefty lately (entirely my fault) — but I hope you can forgive us that since I’m rather a bit late and have good content and audio quality than releasing crap. This show shouldn’t be your premiere source of Linux news anyway; it’s conceived as more of an in-depth roundup of the week’s stories with a few interesting opinions (ie. rants) thrown in to spice things up. As far as I see it, as long as we don’t burn out and the show stays interesting for you, I’m fine with it.

Anyhow, we’ll try another recording later today — maybe we can pretend to be all informed and prepared for once, having read all the stuff already. Well, don’t get your hopes up. But I’m sure it’ll be funny nonetheless. Expect lots of in-jokes at the failed first recording attempt… I guess this stuff just happens. One just has to move on, try to learn from the mistakes made and don’t look back too much. Beer usually helps with this…