Ian Hubert joins Mango project as director, schedule is announced

by Alexandre Prokoudine
Filed under: 3D,
Blender

During a meeting at SIGGRAPH last weekend Blender Fondation announced that Ian Hubert is joining the upcoming Mango project as director.

Mango project will be a new Foundation’s open movie that is going to explore and improve motion tracking, keying and color grading. Due to complexity of work the movie will be trimeed down to 5-6 minutes from the usual 10-11 minutes.

Ian’s current project is Project London, a sci-fi live action movie that is currently in post-production. Given Ian’s experience it looks like he is going to make a superb director. Here is the most recent teaser of Project London:

Here is current schedule:

  • September/October: work on concept and script, call for participation
  • November: start of DVD pre-sale campaign
  • November/December: pre-production workshop
  • January: storyboarding by director and concept artist
  • February: production starts, full animatic
  • End of March: 3 weeks of filming in green screen studio
  • April/July: post-production

The target is to get 6-7 artists and 2-3 developers. Half a dozen of developers already expressed their interest in working on the project, most notably Nicholas Bishop, Sergey Sharybin, Brecht van Lommel, Campbell Barton and Jeroen Bakker.

Personally, I wouldn’t do any bets, but Sergey is working on camera tracking that is essential for the movie, and Jeroen works on rewriting the compositing functionality that is also essential for the movie. On the other hand, Sergey already starts working for Blender Foundation part-time in September. So we just need a little patience.

The official development prerequisite for Mango production is fixing the Blender “dependency graph”: animate everything, groups & duplicators, proxy levels, threaded anim updates, anim ‘states’ on multiple times etc.