I first met Francesco last year at YABC, in Gdansk. It was my first Blender-related conference, and my first in-person contact with the community. The second meeting was in Amsterdam at BConf, where he hosted the visit at the Blender Institute. It was then when we agreed to contribute at Caminandes, which resulted in RenderStreet’s servers crunching the Gran Dillama episode.
Francesco joined the Blender Institute in 2012 and is now one of the deepest involved people in the Blender world. He was involved in the Gooseberry campaign and also in the previous open movies done by the Institute. I asked him to answer a few questions for us, and he agreed, so read on for the good part.
Francesco is online at fsiddi.com, has written two books Grafica 3D con Blender and Cinema Stereoscopico, and tweets at @fsiddi.
Enjoy!
Marius Iatan: You are one of the key people in the Blender Foundation. Aside from the obvious – developing Blender – what do you think are the Foundation’s main role and responsibilities in the Blender ecosystem?
Francesco Siddi: I’d like to make clear that I don’t work for Blender Foundation, but for the Blender Institute. I volunteer some of my time to Blender Foundation though.
Blender Foundation’s main role is making sure that Blender stays open and free. In the last few years, thanks to initiatives like the Blender Development Fund and the Blender Network, there has been a growing number of people being involved full-time in Blender and one of the targets is to keep this trend growing.
Marius: How do you see the Blender community? What are its strengths, what are its flaws?
Francesco: The Blender Community is very, very large and diverse. It ranges from young students to film and game industry professionals, from scientists and researchers to hobbyists. The community is made of users and developers, and what makes it strong is the bound between them. Blender has come a long way because of the generosity of both sides.
As any successful project, Blender has also a number of detractors as well as extremist supporters, but this is natural, not a flaw. Parts of the community sometime tend to focus a lot on Blender, ignoring what is going on in the rest of the world, whereas it would be nice to keep and open-minded attitude.
I’m proud to be part of the Blender Community.
Marius: If you were to use just one word to describe the community, what would that word be?
Francesco: Awesome. In space.
Marius: Gooseberry was the first crowd-funding campaign rolled by the Foundation. As the man that orchestrated it, do you think it was a success? If you were to start again, would you do anything differently?
Francesco: Well, the Blender Institute (not the Foundation) has actually done several campaigns before Gooseberry (all the previous Open Movies were crowd-funded) and they always met their target.
This time the bar was set so high that making it was not to be taken for granted, and even if the final goal was not completely met, I consider it a success. The community response has been overwhelmingly positive and we are currently reorganising the project to fit our current support level. We already have enough budget to develop a pilot for the film and it’s a great chance to show what the actual film could look like.
There are a few things that could have been done better, in particular some aspects of the communication with the community.
Marius: The Blender Cloud was launched in the same time with the campaign, which caused the Cloud to have a strong connection with Gooseberry. What will the future bring to the Cloud after Project Gooseberry is over?
Francesco: The Blender Cloud has a bright future ahead. Among other things, it will be a platform for individuals, independent studios or any group of people to collaborate on Blender projects. It will also be a collection of high quality educational resources, and the best way to follow the Open Movie Productions from Blender Institute.
Subscription-based system, based on open content and free software are a new trend, and Blender is bringing a good deal of innovation.
Marius: As a 3D artist, do you think that Blender has a chance of becoming mainstream in the animation/VFX industry? What would it take to get there?
Francesco: In the “industry” is quite common to use whatever tool works for the job, and Blender is being picked up already for several tasks (modeling, motion tracking, simulations) in feature film pipelines. In some cases the adoption of Blender (or other software) in a pipeline is limited by the design of the pipeline itself, by the experience of the crew working on a project and so on. In the next years I am confident we will see Blender featured more and more in major film productions, alongside others.
Let’s not forget that there are already a few animated feature films being made mainly in Blender.
Marius: You were involved in the latest movies created by the Foundation: Tears of Steel and Caminandes. What were the main challenges in producing open movie projects?
Francesco: On top of the ordinary challenges of producing a film (making sure it gets delivered on time, with the best budged-quality balance possible), we have to deal with the development of Blender itself. We try really hard to add functionality to the software in a way that would bring benefits to the largest audience possible, making the tools as good as we can.
In several cases this is not possible right off the bat, and developers are happy to keep working and interacting with the users to polish a feature to its optimal state.
Marius: The Blender Conference is another initiative you are involved in. What will be the highlights of this year’s edition?
Francesco: At the moment, no plans have been announced, but as usual we will try to make it great (Suzanne Awards, live streaming, lightning talks and so on). Updates on this are coming soon, check out www.blender.org/conference.
Francesco also sent his ‘happy’ picture
