Last year, we spotlighted Big Buck Bunny, a wonderful collaborative animated feature film orchestrated by the Blender Foundation, provider of free open-source 3D animation software, who brought together seven of the world’s best 3D animators to spend seven months in Amsterdam, collaborating on the film. Now, Blender is back with an even more ambitious project — Sintel, an independent short film produced by an international team of artists and developers, designed to demonstrate the power of free, open-source creation tools and global collaboration.

Sintel was subsidized through thousands of donations from supporters across the web — powerful validation for both open-source software as a driver of creative collaboration and the importance of community support for enabling self-publishing and free content, something we can certainly appreciate given Brain Pickings is made possible solely by the generous donations of readers.