After more than a year of work, we’re proud to finally show our CG film Sintel to the world! You can watch the film online or download it in a variety of formats – on our download hub, you can find streaming links and various download formats up to cinema-scale 2k resolution with 5.1 sound.

Sintel is the most recent venture of the Amsterdam-based Blender Institute, which has been promoting free software and open content for half a decade. Following the success of its predecessors Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny, Sintel is the third “open movie” that has been created by a team of young creative professionals from around the world. Produced by Ton Roosendaal, directed by Colin Levy and written by Esther Wouda, the film tells the tale of a solitary young girl who finds an unlikely companion in the streets of her inhospitable hometown. When the friends are ruthlessly torn apart, she embarks on a desperate journey during which she has to face not only deadly perils, but also come to terms with her real vulnerabilities.

I’ve been responsible for both the musical scoring and the rest of the audio work – i.e. sound design, foley, dialogue editing, and 5.1 mixing – of Sintel. To go with the epic fantasy setting, I’ve written a sweeping, late-romantic orchestral score, which is going to be released under a Creative Commons license on this site soon.

Each of us has put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the production of this film; it has been an inspiring, exhilarating, and exhausting ride from start to finish. I thoroughly enjoyed working with a wonderful team of creative, inspired artists, and I sincerely hope you’ll get just as much enjoyment from watching the movie.

This week the CG short film Sintel, on which I’ve been responsible for the music and sound, will be released to the public. Last Monday, the production team gathered in Utrecht, NL, where Sintel was shown to an audience of 450 people in the sold-out Pathé Rembrandt theatre. The event was part of the Netherlands Film Festival proceedings; the NFF is the largest film festival in the Netherlands.

Photo by Mike Pan

It was an exciting evening! The festival staff was friendly and helpful, the cinema was great, and the audience reaction to our film was overwhelmingly positive. We were all hovering a few centimeters above the ground at the afterparty ;)

If everything goes according to schedule, we will release Sintel to the entire world via our website tomorrow on Thursday, September 30th.

In a recent broadcast, German public radio station DRadio Wissen (a division of Deutschlandradio) has featured a segment about my work on Sintel and other open movies. The interview is part of their ongoing “Spielraum” category and can be listened to in its entirety on their website (German language).

On the blog that accompanies the production of the short film Sintel, I recently wrote a small feature outlining my audio workflow and the logistics involved. I explain how the various audio elements – covering sound design, foley/SFX recording, 5.1 mixing, and music composition – come together over the course of the film’s production, and how I assemble them to build the final soundtrack of the movie. You can read the full article here.

The official trailer of the CG film Sintel has just been released:

Sintel is an epic CG short film currently in production, with an estimated release date in July 2010. Directed by Colin Levy and produced by Ton Roosendaal, it will be the third open movie under the aegis of the Amsterdam-based Blender Institute. I’m responsible for all audio aspects of the movie that range from the film score all the way to the 5.1 re-recording mix.

You can find out more about Sintel on the official production blog and on my references page.

The new site is based on a WordPress CMS backend with a fully customized theme and should be much easier to maintain. It’s all still in beta, so if you find any irregularities (Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction!), I’d appreciate if you could tell me about it.