Blender is the software of choice for many 3D artists. For some, it was love at first sight, for others it’s just a program they use to deliver the work. For Bassam Kurdali open source—‘libre’ as he calls it—is more than a tool, it is the result of the evolution of human nature that achieved a new level of interaction and cooperation.

In this interview, I’m talking to the director of the first animated open movie ever made. Which is kind of cool, as his Elephants Dream might someday be mentioned in textbooks. Bassam is a wayward on his own pace, following his dreams. I wanted to discover him better, but what I got was a new puzzle. A comprehensive mind that holds so many surprising things to come.

Marius Iatan: You lived in the US and went to an American school, but your origins are Syrian. Has your Levantian background influenced your vision as a 3D artist?

Bassam Kurdali: The Levant is where the sun rises. Like the end of the rainbow, a dream. Perhaps, behind my eyelids, some mornings there is a giant burning lake. A tiny black figure waits on the beach as the wet sun drips fire into the waves. Light spills from my eye cracks, washes over my frozen room and blinds me.

The Levant is also our mythical past, the place of risings. Here in New England, we stretch our recent past back in time. The Mayflower is our genesis, all moments since are amplified, the pre-Columbian era all but eradicated. In Damascus, I was surrounded by architectural remnants. Ancient walls would even peek from the foundations of buildings before the concrete poured in, as new builders hastily erased an inconvenient history. No matter how hard we try to bury our past, old cities still pop up under our feet.

Today it can be hard to detach my own contributions from the flow of ideas and dialog at Urchin. In our work we explore ruins, architecture, the traces of the past in the present, the elaborate hallucinations people force each other to live in. It’s no accident that we are working on Gilgamesh, because even casting back that far, you find the same human obsessions, the same constant reworkings of ‘the Levant’ into present meaning.

Marius: You are a passionate supporter of Creative Commons. Can you briefly explain what is your philosophy towards open source?

Bassam: Well, I’m a supporter as you have guessed : ) What really resonates for me is a specific thing: that Free and Open Source Software (and in parallel Creative Commons) is about people, not so purely about code or legal documents. So it is more about the relations between people as they exchange something of practical or cultural value. This is why I like using words like ‘libre’ or ‘free’ when talking about these topics, since ‘Open Source’ sometimes feels too abstract. However, I do think this shift in human relationships affects the work itself, that there can be something different and pleasingly indie about libre art and code compared to proprietary works.

An idea that also relates to your previous question: growing up in Syria, before the internet was big, was sometimes isolating. We were on the periphery of technological and artistic creative centers that were mostly somewhere else. Libre software and the internet – the latter largely built on the former – and the ‘sharing and remix’ culture that is codified in Creative Commons – has a levelling effect that feels refreshing. It might not have decentralized the world yet, but at least it has enlarged those centers and stretched them to reach more people. I think it is very humane, and it could touch some child somewhere in the world that they are an equal, a participant. So maybe… to get political for a moment, this is sort of an anti-colonialism? Not understood just as the traditional colonialism of invasion, but also as the colonization of the mind by the purveyors of consumption and scarcity.

Marius: What do you enjoy mostly in your work? What inspires you and what keeps you going?

Bassam: Well, the answer to this can change on any given day. I’m into – some would say obsessed by – film and with a notion of what it means to be cinematic, but I can’t explain this well in words, only with (moving) images. What’s driving me so far is that I’m not quite saying it right, so when I do, I’ll either quit making movies, or (I hope) some new possibilities will open up for me. There’s also a seductive side to film, that it can make people feel things, a sort of propaganda for one’s own feelings. But all of that is too high level and abstract, there’s something intensely satisfying about constructing a film, a shot or a nuance of light or performance that can keep me endlessly absorbed.

I also like the way art can explore the limits of thought, the (false?) dualism of fiction and reality. In films we can sometimes see reality as a fiction, fragmented and patchy, held together sometimes by consensus and sometimes by violence – and (that) we’re often unable to tell which is which.

And finally, I like the process. it can be frustrating at times, but it is also rewarding, I feel privileged to be working in this field.

Marius: What can other people that believe in the values of open source do for strengthening this trend?

Bassam: Contributing to F/LOSS projects is I think the most practically, useful, thing one can do. But contributions aren’t limited just to code, there are many other ways – people can create documentation, carefully report or triage bugs, help other people and enrich the community, or even do more ‘businessy’ things such as marketing, fund-raising, managing, etc. I’ve also seen more than one person do academic research about free and open source projects, and I see that as a valuable contribution too, enriching our understanding of the movement or giving practical insight into making good projects. Finally (and this is my bias) I see ‘open source’ as a movement for social good, so forging alliances with other positive social movements feels like a natural extension of it, and I think that’s also a worthwhile task.

Marius: In 2006 you directed the first 3D open source animation: Elephants Dream. Has anything changed in the past 8 years in the way an animation movie is produced?

Bassam: Yes of course, a lot has changed in CG the last few years. But probably much more changed (technically) in the 10 years before Elephants Dream than in the decade after it. From an artistic perspective, I think there’s been a slow shift where the initial concern with verisimilitude and the ‘wow’ of CG has worn off and we’re starting to see CG emulating hand drawn or stop motion animation. This was already happening maybe since the beginnings of the medium, but I think it is more of a trend now. But a harder to identify trend is the impact of CG on design and art in general, that reflects back on it – maybe that would be an interesting thing to study.

Technically I think software has gotten a lot better: better renderers, advances in compositing, etc. One of the bigger evolutions has been in sculpting – I think it was already a thing during Elephants Dream, but now it has become more mainstream, where characters are sculpted and then retoplogized more often rather than modeled straight out.

From our specific perspective there’s been a welcome growth of open sourced libraries in the CG world, which benefits everybody, and Blender itself has probably improved faster than ever – I’d say almost caught up, and in some cases completely caught up, with the ‘state of the art’.

One area which I think hasn’t changed enough is in animation tools, at least, not in general. This is an area which could stand to improve, as most of the rigging/animation paradigms in mainstream software are still based on stuff we were using in the ‘90s. Many studios have proprietary solutions that nobody sees, and there are a handful of interesting plugins that are out in the wild. Hopefully Blender can be a leader here : )

Marius: What are the particularities in directing an open source movie, what aspects are different from a classic production?

Bassam: In some ways it is quite similar, you have after all similar problems, workflows and so on. However, you do have to get things done using Free Software, and I think the BF Open movie projects have been really important to make sure that Blender – and the rest of the pipeline – works for production. Elephants Dream also had the luxury of a local team, talking to each other in one room. Making Wires for Empathy is a bit more like an open source project, since our team is almost completely distributed, so we have to think about how we communicate with each other, and how to share files over a long distance, and doing it with free software.

Funding and distribution are radically different – for instance we won’t go around suing people for downloading our films ; ) – but it feels like making a movie is a giant collaboration with everybody else – both during its creation and later during distribution. We don’t have this weird secrecy that seems to hover over Hollywood projects. I’m often reminded of this when Tube artists ask if they can use clips of the film-in-progress in their reels (the answer is yes).

Using free software is mostly a benefit, since it allows us to standardize on our own set of ‘in house’ tools that we can control. It is almost like the developers of the software are on our crew. My colleagues who use proprietary software are often stunned that we can find a bug, report it, and have it fixed in the same day. This is not the typical experience in the industry, unless you work at a huge studio, and maybe not even then. One interesting area we’ve been working on is in project/asset management, which could be the next big thing for open movies.

Marius: Looking back, how did Elephants Dream influence the open source world? What was the most important result after making that movie in your opinion?

Bassam: I’m probably too close to the film to be objective. I think it had a positive impact. The most simple one was creating a definition for ‘Open Movie Project’ that was now backed by an example: the film has to be made with free software, it has to be released under a Creative Commons or similar open license, and it has to be released with the production files needed to make the film (under CC for assets/artworks and GPL or similar license for code).

The film also was a proving ground, a trial by fire for the newly liberated Blender and its community of artists and programmers to produce a short film. The experience was an amazing one and it resulted in not just the completed film, but in technical advancements to Blender (both in the animation system and the (then new) compositor)

It was interesting to see the film spread without much effort at a ‘release’; it got uploaded on film websites, and was seeded for years (a rarity) on bittorent by enthusiastic users, as well as having the more typical festival and public showings. It reached some interesting places – an exhibition at the MoMA was really unexpected and cool, but equally novel was seeing the film pop up on the exhibition floors of tech shows, where the Creative Commons license and high quality HD animation made it an attractive option for exhibitors looking to show off their wares. The assets from the film have shown up in remixes and new productions. I suspect we haven’t seen the end of Elephants Dream yet. In fact, in the last week Andy and I have been updating the character models, rigs and shaders to work in Blender 2.73 and Cycles. It’s great to see them in the new renderer – expect to see something cool soon, to celebrate the project’s 10th anniversary!

Marius: What was your experience with crowdfunding, do you think Kickstarter campaigns are a good solution for 3D independent artists?

Bassam: Crowdfunding in general can be a great thing for art and artists, as a more direct way to establish a community around the making of art. This fits well with the people-to-people pattern of the free culture movement. But 3D animation can be very expensive, and makes the question of independence and sustainability a tricky one. It’s a problem so many of the artists I know are trying to crack.

The potential for web based platforms to develop federation holds some promise to influence the mechanisms of funding, creation, and distribution of work in new ways. We have some exciting ideas in this vein, and try to act as agitants in the community to help them come to fruition. Hopefully, we’ll be able to work together to create some cool things in this direction in the future.

Marius: Tell us about your newest project. Was it possibly inspired by the famous Edward Snowden in any way?

Bassam: Haha! It sounds like you’re kidding, but it is not too far from a project that Fateh and I had written in the year 4 B.S.E (Before the Snowden Era) with the title ‘Very Satisfied’ that is set in a society where surveillance is ubiquitous to an absurd degree. One effect of the Snowden revelations is that maybe our satire needs to go even further, as the reality is now more extreme. In any case, look forward to something about the absence of privacy, a fugitive lab-rat, sad drab working people, and robots – lots of robots.

Thanks for all your thoughtful questions. Interested parties can keep an eye on URCHN.ORG where, occasionally, we post the things.