New project: Agent 327, Barbershop Test

In February and March we've caught up with tutorials and other content duties in Cloud. This will continue in the coming months, everyone here now has Monday assigned as "cloud day"!

But we have a studio for other good reasons too - to make compelling content and push Blender further with it. Last week we've decided to pick up last year's project with the (world famous in Netherlands) Agent 327 cartoon series. Hjalti pitched a very funny fight scene in a barbershop - which will serve very well to explore the character of the secret agent and the universe he lives in. We visited cartoonist Martin Lodewijk in Rotterdam last week to discuss the work and we're delighted that he loves it as well.

The Agent animation test will last about 80-90 seconds, has at least 3 characters in it (10 if I spoil the ending) and is expected to take us 4 months to complete. Expect only the best!

From a (technical) Blender point of view, this work will give us nice new challenges. We'll have to bring cartoony but convincing characters alive, made in a style somewhere inside the triangle "Big hero 6" - "How to train a dragon" and "Despicable me". We will use Blenrig extensively, the new dependency graph, OpenSubdiv, the new widgets, (a bit of) cloth sim, and we will align with the recode of mesh display and modifiers, to make it ready for the first generation of 'everything' nodes.

Another important reason to work on the Agent 327 project is to explore its viability as a potential commercial feature animation film - made here in our studio with Blender and with other open source software. We will be attending the Annecy Festival in France to further connect with market parties for it.

As usual, all our work will be made available here as Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA in this case). It will be a more complicated CC this time though, because we base it on copyrighted works by a Dutch cartoonist - who doesn't want his original characters themselves to become CC. Luckily the Creative Commons supports this - for as long we prominently mark what's ours (and what gets CC'ed), and what's copyrighted by a third party (the character designs). We'll add a CC FAQ here to explain this further later.

Much more will be added here in the coming days. Stay tuned!

 Image: Boris Kloris, the Agent's arch enemy. First model by Andy Goralczyk.