I want to thank Campbell Barton and the guys from the Blender Institute’s Project Peach for sending Dan and me each a copy of their wonderful movie Big Buck Bunny which will be released online today.

I received my DVD this week and have watched it about a dozen times since. Simply put, this thing rocks! The artistic quality in the design, rendering and the score is amazing. It looks like something from Pixar and the story is on par with that as well. I literally laughed through the whole film when I first saw it (no spoilers here, but you gotta watch through the credits — there’s a very funny little twist at the end). One thing I especially love is the fact that the two DVDs are packed choc full with material: There’s HD versions of the film, the soundtrack, scripts, all the models and tutorials how to use them in Blender and much more. Since everything is licensed under Creative Commons, you are basically free the use all the stuff from the movie to play around with yourself. It’s amazing!

You can get the movie via torrents and directly from the Blender site, but please consider buying the DVDs to support these guys. They have definitely earned it and with all the content you get on the DVDs, it’s worth it as well! The only slight gripe I have about all of this is that the movie is only 10 minutes long. I really hope the guys are considering to expand on these wonderful characters in the future. I am really thankful to them for bringing us this brilliant creation and for the immense service they did to Free Software by doing it.

Note: Stay tuned for our full review in episode 41 of the show.