Blender Institute
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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The Blender Institute is an animation studio that creates 3-D films using Blender software. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands.
Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-based), charging for physical copies, selling merchandise
Interview date: March 8, 2016
Interviewee: Francesco Siddi, production coordinator
Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
For Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender software and its related entities, sharing is practical. Making their 3-D content creation software available under a free software license has been integral to its development and popularity. Using that software to make movies that were licensed with Creative Commons pushed that development even further. Sharing enables people to participate and to interact with and build upon the technology and content they create in a way that benefits Blender and its community in concrete ways.
Each open-movie project Blender runs produces a host of openly licensed outputs, not just the final film itself but all of the source material as well. The creative process also enhances the development of the Blender software because the technical team responds directly to the needs of the film production team, creating tools and features that make their lives easier. And, of course, each project involves a long, rewarding process for the creative and technical community working together.
Rather than just talking about the theoretical benefits of sharing and free culture, Ton is very much about doing and making free culture. Blender’s production coordinator Francesco Siddi told us,
Ton believes if you don’t make content using your tools, then you’re not doing anything.
Blender’s history begins in the late 1990s, when Ton created the Blender software. Originally, the software was an in-house resource for his animation studio based in the Netherlands. Investors became interested in the software, so he began marketing the software to the public, offering a free version in addition to a paid version. Sales were disappointing, and his investors gave up on the endeavor in the early 2000s. He made a deal with investors — if he could raise enough money, he could then make the Blender software available under the GNU General Public License.
This was long before Kickstarter and other online crowdfunding sites existed, but Ton ran his own version of a crowdfunding campaign and quickly raised the money he needed. The Blender software became freely available for anyone to use. Simply applying the General Public License to the software, however, was not enough to create a thriving community around it. Francesco told us, “Software of this complexity relies on people and their vision of how people work together. Ton is a fantastic community builder and manager, and he put a lot of work into fostering a community of developers so that the project could live.”
Like any successful free and open-source software project, Blender developed quickly because the community could make fixes and improvements. “Software should be free and open to hack,” Francesco said. “Otherwise, everyone is doing the same thing in the dark for ten years.” Ton set up the Blender Foundation to oversee and steward the software development and maintenance.
After a few years, Ton began looking for new ways to push development of the software. He came up with the idea of creating CC-licensed films using the Blender software. Ton put a call online for all interested and skilled artists. Francesco said the idea was to get the best artists available, put them in a building together with the best developers, and have them work together. They would not only produce high-quality openly licensed content, they would improve the Blender software in the process.
They turned to crowdfunding to subsidize the costs of the project. They had about twenty people working full-time for six to ten months, so the costs were significant. Francesco said that when their crowdfunding campaign succeeded, people were astounded. “The idea that making money was possible by producing CC-licensed material was mind-blowing to people,” he said. “They were like, ‘I have to see it to believe it.’”
The first film, which was released in 2006, was an experiment. It was so successful that Ton decided to set up the Blender Institute, an entity dedicated to hosting open-movie projects. The Blender Institute’s next project was an even bigger success. The film, Big Buck Bunny, went viral, and its animated characters were picked up by marketers.
Francesco said that, over time, the Blender Institute projects have gotten bigger and more prominent. That means the filmmaking process has become more complex, combining technical experts and artists who focus on storytelling. Francesco says the process is almost on an industrial scale because of the number of moving parts. This requires a lot of specialized assistance, but the Blender Institute has no problem finding the talent it needs to help on projects. “Blender hardly does any recruiting for film projects because the talent emerges naturally,” Francesco said. “So many people want to work with us, and we can’t always hire them because of budget constraints.”
Blender has had a lot of success raising money from its community over the years. In many ways, the pitch has gotten easier to make. Not only is crowdfunding simply more familiar to the public, but people know and trust Blender to deliver, and Ton has developed a reputation as an effective community leader and visionary for their work. “There is a whole community who sees and understands the benefit of these projects,” Francesco said.
While these benefits of each open-movie project make a compelling pitch for crowdfunding campaigns, Francesco told us the Blender Institute has found some limitations in the standard crowdfunding model where you propose a specific project and ask for funding. “Once a project is over, everyone goes home,” he said. “It is great fun, but then it ends. That is a problem.”
To make their work more sustainable, they needed a way to receive ongoing support rather than on a project-by-project basis. Their solution is Blender Cloud, a subscription-style crowdfunding model akin to the online crowdfunding platform, Patreon. For about ten euros each month, subscribers get access to download everything the Blender Institute produces — software, art, training, and more. All of the assets are available under an Attribution license (CC BY) or placed in the public domain (CC0), but they are initially made available only to subscribers. Blender Cloud enables subscribers to follow Blender’s movie projects as they develop, sharing detailed information and content used in the creative process. Blender Cloud also has extensive training materials and libraries of characters and other assets used in various projects.
The continuous financial support provided by Blender Cloud subsidizes five to six full-time employees at the Blender Institute. Francesco says their goal is to grow their subscriber base. “This is our freedom,” he told us, “and for artists, freedom is everything.”
Blender Cloud is the primary revenue stream of the Blender Institute. The Blender Foundation is funded primarily by donations, and that money goes toward software development and maintenance. The revenue streams of the Institute and Foundation are deliberately kept separate. Blender also has other revenue streams, such as the Blender Store, where people can purchase DVDs, T-shirts, and other Blender products.
Ton has worked on projects relating to his Blender software for nearly twenty years. Throughout most of that time, he has been committed to making the software and the content produced with the software free and open. Selling a license has never been part of the business model.
Since 2006, he has been making films available along with all of their source material. He says he has hardly ever seen people stepping into Blender’s shoes and trying to make money off of their content. Ton believes this is because the true value of what they do is in the creative and production process. “Even when you share everything, all your original sources, it still takes a lot of talent, skills, time, and budget to reproduce what you did,” Ton said.
For Ton and Blender, it all comes back to doing.
