Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

This fifteen minute film was created to “improve and validate” Blender, an open source 3d animation suite.  Initial funding was provided by internet donations, artists and other staff were found through an international search, culminating in a group of fourteen people who brought a fifteen minute computer rendered film from pre-production to finish in a year.

Not only was Sintel created on open source software, it is also completely open itself:

All of the work of the Durian team in the past 18 months will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, free for everyone to distribute, learn from or re-use. The 4-disc DVD set will provide all data to be able to recreate and rerender the film in its entirety.

Did we mention that in addition to all of that, the movie itself also made us tear up a bit?  Watch it.  Get it.  Make something new from it.