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Southern California Open Source User Resources
Hollywood | Los Angeles | Orange County | San Diego

 
     NOTE: New Website Coming Soon!
 
 
 
 

 
 
About SoCalBlender.org

Open source software in media production provides opportunities to people of all means to produce professional quality work. This provides a more even playing field for the average person and provides a type of decentralization and deomcratization of the industry by focusing more on talent and production quality than if someone is part of an established studio workforce or using industry standard software.

SoCalBlender.org is committed to supporting the people of the region and providing opportunities they might not otherwise have by way of open creative media production.

 

How it Got Started

Founded back in early 2010 as an umbrella group and subsequent website for the growing open source movement in Southern California, the website was intended as a reflection of what users had already been doing.

Hollywood and the media production industry was growing in its commitment to the movement by both open sourcing proprietary code, making code contributions to other sofware and using several F/LOSS tools in production.

An affiliated group of blender users from SIGGRAPH 2012 blender Birds of a Feather formed LA.blend to organize blender user group meetups that follow a specific and brandable meeting format. SoCalBlender.org subsequently provided support and a web presence to promote that group as well as other open source digital content creation(DCC) software.

 

About the Name

Several names were considered. Most had SoCal in them to keep the focus on the people of Southern California. Adding blender to the name almost did not happen because the original intent was to reflect and support the people behind the whole open source movement in Hollywood and Southern California and not to restrict it to association with one piece of software like blender 3D.

But due to the prominent use of the word blender as a description of not only the Southern California lifestyle but California in general it was chosen as part of the name. It accurately reflects the mixing of all the diverse ingredients that make up this smooth region. Additionally it was a nice double entendre that the primary sofware supported by the group and subgroups in the beginning was blender.org's blender DCC application.