Elephants Dream (code-named Project Orange during production and originally titled Machina) is a 2006 Dutch computer-animated science fiction fantasy experimental short film produced by Blender Foundation using, almost exclusively, free and open-source software. The film is English-language and includes subtitles in over 30 languages.
Plot
An old man, Proog (voiced by Tygo Gernandt), guides the young Emo (voiced by Cas Jansen) through a giant surreal machine, in which the rooms have no clear transition to each other. After Proog saves Emo from flying plugs in a room consisting of a gigantic telephone switchboard, they run through a dark room filled with electrical cables and flee from a flock of bird-like robots. In the next room, Emo is tempted to answer a ringing phone, but Proog stops him and reveals a trap. The room is also occupied by a robot resembling a self-operating typewriter, which Emo appears to laugh at.
The next room is a large abyss from which metal supports appear from below; Proog nimbly dances across the abyss on the supports, while Emo casually walks along and does not seem to notice the stilts supporting him. Proog explains to Emo that the machine is like clockwork and could destroy them both if one wrong move is made. The two enter an elevator that is catapulted through a series of apertures by a pair of mechanical slats. Proog instructs Emo to close his eyes as they ascend to an empty dark void. Proog asks Emo what he sees, and is pleased by Emo's reply that he sees nothing as they plunge rapidly into the next room. A projector creates an image of a door from which music emanates. Emo asks to go through the door, but Proog insists that it is unsafe, and presses a button within his cane to enclose them both in a smaller room.
Proog asks Emo why he fails to recognize the beauty and perfection of the machine, to which Emo responds that the machine does not exist. Frustrated, Proog slaps Emo across the face, pushing the startled Emo to walk away. Emo mockingly imitates Proog's earlier tour to demonstrate the machine's absurdity and manifests the twisted versions of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (in the form of mechanical roots) and the Colossus of Rhodes (in the form of gigantic hands), which threaten to destroy Proog's constructed world. Proog knocks Emo unconscious with his cane and causes his creations to disappear, Proog desperately asserts to Emo that the machine exists.
Production
In May 2005, Ton Roosendaal announced the project. The primary piece of software used to create the film was Blender; other programs used in production include DrQueue, Inkscape, Seashore, Twisted, Verse, CinePaint, GIMP, OpenEXR, Reaktor, Subversion, Python, Ubuntu, GNOME, and KDE. All of the software, except Reaktor, was free and open-source. The project was jointly funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of the funding for the project by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Production began in September 2005, under the code-name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later named Machina, and then finally renamed to Elephants Dream in reference to a Dutch tradition whereby parents might abruptly end children's bedtime stories with the introduction of a sneezing elephant. The primary purpose of the project was to field test, develop and showcase the capabilities of Blender, demonstrating what can be done with the software in organizing and producing quality content for films. During the film's development, several new features (such as an integrated node-based compositor, hair and fur rendering, rewritten animation system and render pipeline, and many workflow tweaks and upgrades) were added to Blender specifically for the project. The bulk of computer processing power for rendering the film was donated by the BSU Xseed, a 2.1 TFLOPS Apple Xserve G5-based supercomputing cluster at Bowie State University. It reportedly took 125 days to render, consuming up to 2.8GB of memory for each frame. Elephants Dream was released on March 24, 2006. The film itself, along with the other Blender Foundation “open movies,” was released under the Creative Commons Attribution License, so that viewers may learn from it and use it as long as proper attribution is given.