Dutch James Bond Substitute: Agent 327

Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 16, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

“Agent 327: Operation Barbershop” is the Amsterdam team’s most ambitious project to date. The teaser was directed by former Pixar artist Colin Levy. With the help of the teaser, the Blender Institute wants to generate funding to soon realize the first international animated feature film created entirely with open-source software. The 300,000-euro budget for the teaser was generated through the institute’s crowdfunding platform, the Blender Cloud. All assets from the previous films are freely availabe there for personal use.

The Slightly Different James Bond

Agent 327, also known by his civil name Otto Otto (O.O.) Eisenbrot, is not as handsome as his British colleague. His ears and nose are too large, and the bags under his eyes are impressively sized. In addition, the Dutch Secret Service Agency does not have the budgetary resources of MI6. Agent 327 therefore has to do his job without expensive technical gadgets. “And in the end, he still always manages it somehow. To me, that reflects the spirit of Blender,” says producer Ton Roosendaal.

Team Size

The teaser was realized by a core team of ten artists and developers over a production period of one year. The greatest challenge was transferring the stylized look of the original 1970s comics into 3D. “Agent 327 does not fit the American standard design template for animated characters with his appearance. A huge nose, gigantic ears and bags under his eyes? Have you ever seen such a character in a Disney film?” TD Francesco Siddi rightly asks.

Workflow

The modeling and design process took place under the direction of Blender veteran Andy Goralczyk. The team created the concepts in the 2D painting software Krita; test models were created in Blender itself, and texturing was done with Gimp. As with all Blender Institute open movies, technical developments during a project flow into Blender’s public builds. In the case of “Agent 327,” rendering with Cycles was improved—scenes with hair and motion blur can now be rendered ten times faster. The developers integrated the feature in February with version 2.78b. The optimizations to the dependency graph, which controls how a character rig affects the geometry, are included in the upcoming version 2.8. “This will make substantially more complex animation setups possible,” Siddi explains. Further developments focus on the open-source pipeline tools: the Flamenco render manager and the Attract production tracking system.

Blender Animation Studio

In the course of the film, the Blender Institute has now launched Blender Animation Studio—a department operating separately from the institute and devoted entirely to creating feature films. To do so, the Blender Institute wants to recruit around 80 artists and developers from the institute’s international network. To reach the planned budget of 14 million, the institute signed with talent agency WME, which also represents directors such as Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Michael Bay.