Sintel is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. Between, if you haven't heard about it yet, you probably haven't heard about 3 previous open source movie projects by Blender namely Yo Frankie, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. The initial funding for the project was provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community.