Elephants Dream

Elephants Dream
The two characters in the film, Emo and Proog
Directed by	Bassam Kurdali
Produced by	Ton Roosendaal
Written by	Pepijn Zwanenberg
Starring	Cas Jansen Tygo Gernandt
Music by	Jan Morgenstern
Production company	Blender Foundation Netherlands Institute for Media Art / Montevideo TBA The Orange Open Movie Project
Distributed by	Blender Foundation
Release date	24 March 2006
Running time	9 minutes
Country	Netherlands
Language	English
Budget	€120,000

Elephants Dream (code-named Orange and originally titled Machina) is a 2006 English-language and Dutch-produced 3D CGI animated science fiction 9-minute short film that was produced almost completely using the free software 3D suite Blender (except for the modular sound studio Reaktor and the cluster that rendered the final production which ran Mac OS X). It premiered on 24 March 2006 after about 8 months of work. Beginning in September 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was later renamed Machina and then to Elephants Dream, referring to a Dutch tradition used by parents to abruptly end children's bedtime stories with the introduction of a sneezing elephant.

The two main characters, Emo (Cas Jansen) and Proog (Tygo Gernandt), are on a journey in the folds of a giant Machine, exploring the twisted and dark complex of wires, gears and cogs. Until one moment a conflict arises that throws out all their assumptions. This movie short couples lively fun with passionate characters in an epic story line.

The film was first announced in May 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program Blender. A 3D modelling, animating and rendering application, Blender was the primary piece of software used in the creation of the film. The project was joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has his or her name listed in the film's credits. The bulk of processing 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. The completed film is 10 minutes 54 seconds long including 1 minute and 28 seconds of credits.