Sintel (code-named
Durian) is a short Computer animation film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation.<></><></> Like the foundation's previous films
Elephants Dream and
Big Buck Bunny, the film was made using Blender (software), a free software application for animation created and supported by the same foundation.
Sintel was produced by Ton Roosendaal, chairman of the Foundation, and directed by Colin Levy, an artist at Pixar Animation Studios.
The name comes from the Dutch language word
wikt:sintel, which can mean cinder<></> or ember, as confirmed by Ton Roosendaal in a blog comment:<></>
Overview
Work began in May 2009. The film was officially released on September 27, 2010, at the Netherlands Film Festival.< name="Sintel_official_premiere"/> The online release was made available for download on September 30, 2010.< name="onlineRelease"></> The film was viewed over 1,000,000 times within a matter of weeks.
Plot
A woman, Sintel, is attacked while traveling through a wintery mountainside. After defeating her attacker and taking his spear, she finds uge in a shaman's hut. He asks her why she's travelling, and she confesses she's looking for a dragon, leading into a flashback. Sintel was a homeless loner, looking for food when she discovered an injured baby dragon. She nursed him back to health and named him Scales, the two quickly formed an emotional bond. One day while Scales was flying he was captured by an adult dragon. Determined to get him back, Sintel began the long and dangerous journey that led her to the shaman's hut.
She's ready to give up, when the shaman tells her they're in dragon lands, showing the glyph on the spear as proof. She finds the tree pictured on the spear and near it, a cave with the adult dragon and his baby. The baby runs away upon seeing Sintel and the adult dragon attacks. After a brief battle, the adult dragon pins Sintel to the ground, but freezes when he sees her face. Sintel takes advantage of this and stabs the dragon in the heart. As she's about to land the killing blow, she then notices the scar on its wing is exactly the same as her old friend's. Sintel discovers in a moment of horror that she has just killed Scales.
Scales bleeds out rapidly, and Sintel stares in shock at her lection in a pool of blood. It is revealed that she is significantly older than she has appeared throughout the film. She has much gray hair, worn and wrinkled skin, and several scars on her body. The long search for Scales had lasted several years and she had never realized that during all these years, Scales would've grown up. Her single-minded quest to get back her friend and to take revenge from the large dragon who took Scales away contributed to her mistaking Scales for the small dragon. The cave begins to collapse as Scales gives his last breath, and Sintel runs for the entrance.
After mourning over the friend she killed, Sintel leaves, heartbroken. Scales' baby, having nowhere else to go, follows her.
Announcements
Some sections were displayed on October 25, 2009,<></> 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 on September 27, 2010,<></> and was officially released online on September 30.<></>< name="onlineRelease"/>
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 films and games.< name=about></>< name=institute></>
The film was funded by the Blender Foundation, donations from the Blender community, pre-sales of the film's DVD and commercial sponsorship. Both the final product and production data, including animation data, characters and textures are released under the Creative Commons licenses.<!-- what about music? --></>
Film
File:Sintel movie 720x306.ogv
Copyright incident
On April 5, 2014,
Sintel was temporarily blocked from viewing on the Blender Foundation's official YouTube channel after Sony Pictures Entertainment issued a bogus takedown notice to YouTube falsely claiming it owned the copyrights to the film.<>
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Reviews
Dutch daily newspaper
Het Parool featured a capture of the film on its front page, along with a short review describing it as "darker and less accessible than its child friendly predecessors," but also stating that in "image quality, detail and characters, the film is on par with Hollywood animation."<></>
Game
A game based on Sintel was officially announced on Blenderartists.org on May 12, 2010. This game is called
Sintel The Game.
Category:Blender Foundation
Category:Computer-animated films
Category:Creative Commons-licensed films
Category:Dutch films
Category:Open content short films
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