You know what, I love [Blender](https://www.blender.org/), I really do. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last 10 years, Blender is a free cross-platform 3D modelling application. You may be wondering why someone with the artistic talent of a rubber hammer is so interested in Blender, well its because it provides so much opportunity to produce really professional results.

A case in point is [Elephants Dream](https://www.elephantsdream.org/). Funded by DVD pre-orders and the Blender Foundation, Project Orange produced Elephants Dream; an animated short that looked nothing short of amazing. I was hugely interested in this project at the time as it was (a) producing completely free media (the resulting movie and all of the production files, textures and audio was all released under a free Creative Commons license) but also (b) the production of the movie really stress-tested Blender, and this resulted in a bunch of new features landing in Blender. *An ambitious creative project and developers who can fix and extend the tools so they are suitable for similar work* – this is an excellent combination to ramp up the quality of our software. Luckily the man behind the code is the lead developer himself, Ton Roosendaal, a friend of mine and Hugh Laurie lookalike. He is an incredible guy – driven, talented, focused and with a wicked sense of humour, and the extremely healthy Blender community owes a lot to Ton’s seemingly unbounded energy.

Well, the Amsterdam-bound dutch brigade are at it again with [Peach](https://peach.blender.org/); the second effort at producing an open movie. This time the emphasis is on cuddly creatures and not the strange avant-garde world of Elephants Dream, and they have assembled another stunning group of artists and engineers to take on the project. When Elephants Dream was in production I swung by their studio to say hi, and it was great to see them doing what they do – I am hoping I get to do the same before the production of the new flick finishes.

This is what I love about Open Source – talented people having their talent shine due to free software that enables them to do what they do. All hail Peach, all hail Blender, and all hail Free Software. 🙂

On the new episode of LugRadio, [Season 5 Episode 9](https://www.lugradio.org/episodes/#episode92), we interview the Director of the new Peach movie, Sacha Goedegebure.