Bad news... I contacted the publishers and the answer was no.

Here is a copy of their reply:

=========begin quoted=========

6 August 2002


Dear Rohan Bernett

Harry Potter

Thank you for your email sent today regarding your proposal to make a
raytraced animated version of the Harry Potter books.

I regret to inform you that we are not offering these rights for the
foreseeable future.

In addition, we would ask you to kindly note that 'Harry Potter' and
other images; names and places from this series of books are subject to
complex contractual commitments and trademark restrictions and would
therefore not be available for use by you in any future project.

I am sorry for this disappointing response but would like to thank you
for your interest and enthusiasm in this series of books.

With best wishes

Yours sincerely

Christopher Little
(Agent to J K Rowling)

========end qouted============

Another great idea ruined because of legal nasties. *sigh* :-(

Rohan _e_ii

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Rohan Bernett wrote:

> Bad news... I contacted the publishers and the answer was no.
snipped
> Another great idea ruined because of legal nasties. *sigh* :-(

I for one am not at all surprised at their response considering
the enormous profit potential these books and movies have for
the entertainment industry.

-- 
Ken Tyler

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Rohan Bernett wrote:
> 
> I have a great idea for a huge animation project. How about making a
> raytraced animated version of the Harry Potter books, chapter by
> chapter, word for word. And making the resulting animations available
> for download for free.
> 
> Anybody interested in this idea?
> 
> Rohan _e_ii

(devil's advocate mode_on)
Aside from the copyright side of it, which is discussed in depth by
others, the sheer scope of the books, and the speed of todays computers,
a project of this magnitude would take longer than any of has available,
in this lifetime or the next.

As for the size of the file, even a single book would run into 100's of
mb, and who would want to tie up their phone lines for days on end
waiting for the file(s) to download.

Interesting idea, but at the moment, I think, beyond the scope of a
volunteer group. (where is the group animation from years ago?).
Remember, even the studio who produced the film, spent years on the
computer graphics alone, and that was scan line rendering, not ray
tracing, which is faster to produce on a frame by frame basis.

Alex

-- 
  ,-._|\  Alex McMurray
 /  Oz  \ ale### [at] melbpcorgau               Melbourne PC User Group.
 \_,--.x/ Melton. Vic.  3337                     Australia
       v

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web.3d50b4bc9fdfa9aad02c7b870@news.povray.org...
> Thank you for your email sent today regarding your proposal to make a
> raytraced animated version of the Harry Potter books.

Well at least it's refreshing that they took the time to actually read you
post and answer it, considering the fact that they probably received
hundreds of requests a day about HP material...

G.

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Alex McMurray wrote:

>Aside from the copyright side of it, which is discussed in depth by
>others, the sheer scope of the books, and the speed of todays computers,
>a project of this magnitude would take longer than any of has available,
>in this lifetime or the next.

Rendering time would depend on the resolution of the footage, and if it was
distributed it might be possible.

>As for the size of the file, even a single book would run into 100's of
>mb, and who would want to tie up their phone lines for days on end
>waiting for the file(s) to download.

Well... the file size would depend on the resolution of the video, For
example 320*180 would be a lot smaller than 1024*576, especially if it was
compressed. Maybe there could be a low detail version to download, and a
high detail one to buy on CD or DVD.

>Remember, even the studio who produced the film, spent years on the
>computer graphics alone, and that was scan line rendering, not ray
>tracing, which is faster to produce on a frame by frame basis.

Wouldn't the studios have done their rendering at a really high resolutions,
say 16000*9000 ? The studios would only have been using a few hundred
machines to do the rendering, a distributed project could have thousands.
Hell, if enough people joined the rendering team, they could be rendering
frames faster than the asrtists could make the scenes for rendering.

Rohan _e_ii

Nice to see someone else from Australia in the newsgroup.

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Rohan Bernett wrote:
> 
> Rendering time would depend on the resolution of the footage, and if it was
> distributed it might be possible.
> 
To make it watchable, it would have to be have to be at a reasonable
resolution, I doubt anyone would want to watch a postage size image for
any length of time, running full screen would be preferable.

> Well... the file size would depend on the resolution of the video, For
> example 320*180 would be a lot smaller than 1024*576, especially if it was
> compressed. Maybe there could be a low detail version to download, and a
> high detail one to buy on CD or DVD.
> 
In your original posting, you said that the animation would be word for
word as in the book, the Harry Potter film left out a lot, and even that
run into 147 mins (info from DVD).
I would imagine that animating the whole book word for word would run a
lot longer than that, thereby increasing the overall file size, even at
modest resolution.
You would still be looking at 150 - 200 mb per hour of veiwing time.
(based on other films I've downloaded).
EG.
Star Trek - Hidden Frontier do their show in Quicktime.
X-Files - Graceland is in Real Video.
For the majority of the audience, DivX would preferable, as this is what
most of the group post in.
> 
> Wouldn't the studios have done their rendering at a really high resolutions,
> say 16000*9000 ? The studios would only have been using a few hundred
> machines to do the rendering, a distributed project could have thousands.
> Hell, if enough people joined the rendering team, they could be rendering
> frames faster than the asrtists could make the scenes for rendering.
> 
Agreed, Star Wars - The Phantom Menace did this, but they also used the
office PC's when the office staff went home, augmenting their own PC's
by another 100 or so.

The group has a movie project going at the moment, is started (many)
years ago. using the idea that you proposed, I have heard nothing about
it lately.

> Rohan _e_ii
> 
> Nice to see someone else from Australia in the newsgroup.

There a quite a few in the group from Australia, I live about half an
hour's drive from Chris Cason (turns and bows), in the Western Suburb of
Melbourne.

-- 
  ,-._|\  Alex McMurray
 /  Oz  \ ale### [at] melbpcorgau               Melbourne PC User Group.
 \_,--.x/ Melton. Vic.  3337                     Australia
       v

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Alex McMurray <ale### [at] melbpcorgau> wrote in
news:3D52EE42.48ADA129@melbpc.org.au: 

> Rohan Bernett wrote:
>> Wouldn't the studios have done their rendering at a really high
>> resolutions, say 16000*9000 ? The studios would only have been using
>> a few hundred machines to do the rendering, a distributed project
>> could have thousands. Hell, if enough people joined the rendering
>> team, they could be rendering frames faster than the asrtists could
>> make the scenes for rendering. 
>> 
> Agreed, Star Wars - The Phantom Menace did this, but they also used
> the office PC's when the office staff went home, augmenting their own
> PC's by another 100 or so.

I have an idea: why not make a POV-Ray screen saver, like the Seti@Home 
one, or those use to break a cryptographic challenge or to decode genome?

A server would send scenes to render, the home computer would render the 
scene and send it back to the server.

While the scene would be of reasonable size (unless using huge meshes), 
the rendered images would be big, which make a less practical idea than 
Seti, where exchanged data is rather small...
Perhaps it will more usable when most people will have broadband 
connexions to Internet.

Actually, I believe that the current POV-Ray licence doesn't allow such an 
idea, but perhaps it can be done in the 4.0 version.

Regards.

-- 
--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/

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Philippe Lhoste wrote:

>I have an idea: why not make a POV-Ray screen saver, like the Seti[at]Home
>one, or those use to break a cryptographic challenge or to decode genome?

BRILLIANT!!! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

>While the scene would be of reasonable size (unless using huge meshes),
>the rendered images would be big, which make a less practical idea than
>Seti, where exchanged data is rather small...
>Perhaps it will more usable when most people will have broadband
>connexions to Internet.

You're right there, it would only be practical for broadband users. All that
uploading huge files would take weeks over a snail pace dialup connection.
:-(

However, this could be handy for when you want to render a really slow scene
or an animation, and you don't want to have your computer tied up for hours
(or even days) at a time. Maybe you could have a way to link the saver to a
file on your hard drive, and it would store a temp file containing the
pixel it was up to and which calculation it was on (oh yeah, and the frame
if doing an animation).

Hey POV-Team, why don't you make something like this to go with POV-Ray 4.0?

Rohan _e_ii

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> >I have an idea: why not make a POV-Ray screen saver, like the
Seti[at]Home
> >one, or those use to break a cryptographic challenge or to decode genome?
> BRILLIANT!!! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Technically, there's no problem, it's just that POV would have to go into
pause when the mouse moves or someone presses a key on the keyboard.

> >While the scene would be of reasonable size (unless using huge meshes),
> >the rendered images would be big, which make a less practical idea than
> >Seti, where exchanged data is rather small...
> >Perhaps it will more usable when most people will have broadband
> >connexions to Internet.
> You're right there, it would only be practical for broadband users. All
that
> uploading huge files would take weeks over a snail pace dialup connection.
> :-(

I'm working on a LAN POV server for personal use (well, me and my brother),
but I'm not sure how such a system would work over the internet - images are
quite big, you know, and if you're uploading a lot, you'll spend maybe more
time transmitting than raytracing...

> However, this could be handy for when you want to render a really slow
scene
> or an animation, and you don't want to have your computer tied up for
hours
> (or even days) at a time. Maybe you could have a way to link the saver to
a
> file on your hard drive, and it would store a temp file containing the
> pixel it was up to and which calculation it was on (oh yeah, and the frame
> if doing an animation).

Why not just press the Pause button on POV, work, then press it again?

Personnally, I set the Render priority to its lowet setting and the GUI
setting to the highest priority when I work, and when I go home, I leave the
computer running overnight after changing the settings the other way round.
And if I've got some hefty work to do (batch stuff, mainly), I put POV in
pause.

> Hey POV-Team, why don't you make something like this to go with POV-Ray
4.0?

This is do-able - I'll see what I can come up with tonight... (screen-save
rendering...)

Chris TRIBBECK.

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The best way to do it over the web could be a program working like those
napster-clones enabling the sharing of large files.
So a user could start rendering an image (lets say a block of 10 pixels for
example) while the program is looking for other users rendering the same
picture. Blocks in work will be locked until they are ready or the user
logs out. The blocks already rendered are made available for download to
other users (and could be sent to a central server, too). Transfering 10
pixels wil not be a bandwith problem and the picture will soon be ready if
there are enough users rendering the same scene.

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