Poster of the Pen Source Blender-made animated motion picture "Flow" awarded an Oscar on March 2, 2025. File photo.
Flow, an animated film from Latvia directed by 30-year-old director Gints Zilbalodis and created entirely using open-source software (Blender), won the Oscar for Best Animated Film on Sunday, March 2. It beat Pixar/Disney’s “Inside Out 2,” Adam Elliot’s “Memoirs,” DreamWorks’ “Wild Robot,” and the stop motion “Wallace and Gromit 6.”
Flow takes place in a world where humanity has suddenly disappeared. There is no explanation why, nor is there any need for such an explanation. There are no humans, but there are the remains and vestiges of their civilization. In the middle of this world, which is also ravaged by sudden floods, a black cat sets out on a journey with other animals that he meets along the way (a golden retriever, a capybara, a secretary bird, and a lemur), to survive and adapt to the realities in which they find themselves. The 83-minute film has no spoken dialogue but does feature a spectacular soundtrack.
Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, Flow has continued to win awards, including a Golden Globe last January, which was exhibited at the National Museum of Art of Latvia and seen by more than 15,000 people.
It has also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best International Feature Film, the Cesar Award in France, two Annie Awards, a Lumière Award, and the New York Film Critics Online Award, among many others. Its Wikipedia page lists 38 awards it has won so far.
With this run, Flow became a symbol for Latvia, a country of fewer than two million inhabitants that had never had films nominated for an Oscar or a Golden Globe. In Latvia, Flow had already become a sensation, having become the most-watched film in theaters.
The film had a budget of €3.5 million and a fairly small team. Zilbalodis said it took him five years to make the film, but he spent most of that time securing financing. The actual production took one year.
In numerous interviews and on his social media accounts, Zilbalodis has highlighted several innovations in his film, such as the fact that he did not use storyboards but instead developed the sequences from the script using the free software Blender. “Instead of using storyboards, I design the scenes directly in 3D. This is necessary because of the long takes where the camera moves a lot. I explore a rough version of the set with a virtual camera and often find unexpected discoveries, almost like on a live-action film set,” he said on social media.
This was possible because one of the rendering engines that Blender offers, called EEVEE, allows you to design and navigate scenes in real time as if it were a video game. This allows for modifications to be made within the environment, which is very useful for a filmmaker who wants to constantly make changes and improvements.
The director has also said that they did not use a “render farm” (i.e. a computing center with a set of dozens or hundreds of servers working in parallel to make the final images). “The final render was done on my PC. There was no compositing; all colors were modified and adjusted using shaders.”
Each frame took between 0.5 and 10 seconds to render in 4K resolution using Blender and EEVEE on his computer. This certainly helps to lower production costs.
Zilbalodis has said on social media that he really likes Blender, and he’s going to use it in his next animated film. In fact, he’s shared numerous short videos on Instagram, X, and other social media with tips on how he animated and developed this film.
Blender is a 2D and 3D design and animation software that is also used for special effects. It has been in development since 1994 by Ton Roosendaal, a programmer native to the Netherlands. Initially, it was closed-source software, but in 2002, the company that produced it went bankrupt. From there, Roosendaal created a foundation to maintain its development under the open-source/free software philosophy.
Blender has become famous because, in order to obtain funding for its development, its creators usually put out a call for projects for an animated short film. They raise their budget partly through crowdfunding, partly through state funding (state funds that provide funding for film productions) or similar methods. They use these methods not only for the development of the short film but also for new features in the software.
From there, animations such as Big Buck Bunny, Sintel, Spring or Charge, among others, have emerged.
Blender can be downloaded for free from Blender.org, and there are thousands of tutorials on platforms like YouTube.
Opening paths
Beyond the success of this Latvian filmmaker and his valuable team, Flow gives a great boost and a lot of hope to thousands of young aspiring filmmakers around the world who want to make their own films and animations but are discouraged by the excessive cost of commercial software or because they think they will need a rendering farm (hundreds of computers working in parallel) or a large human team to be able to make their film.
It also gives immense support to the open-source movement, which is often rejected or looked down upon by some people in the art world because they mistakenly consider it inferior, less professional, or less capable.
Flow is just the latest, but not the only film, made with open-source software.
In 2011, Plumíferos was released, an Argentinian film directed by Daniel De Felippo and made mainly with Blender. In 2012, the short film Tears of Steel was created by special effects experts using Blender to demonstrate that it was possible to use it for a production with this level of complexity. In 2015, the US television series The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime, set in a world where Germany won World War II and conquered the United States, used Blender for compositing, sets, and special effects.
In 2019, the film J‘ai perdu mon corps (“where is my body?” or “I lost my body” in English) was released, a French animated feature film made in Blender. It was directed by Jérémy Clapin and based on the novel Happy Hand by Guillaume Laurant. It won the International Critics’ Week Award at the Cannes Film Festival, an Annie Award for Best Independent Film, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Animated Film. In 2022, the adult animated film Unicorn Wars (Spanish-French) was released, directed by Alberto Vázquez, and also made in Blender.
Blender has also been known to be used in the movie Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse (2023). One of its modules (Grease Pencil or Wax Pencil, which allows 2D animations in 3D environments) was used to make details of the animations, complementing the proprietary software Maya. It is also believed to have been used in many film productions from large and small studios for certain effects and retouching.
This new achievement of a product made using open-source software is further evidence of the power of this software that commercially and philosophically confronts the proprietary software used by many who are unaware that open-source alternatives are freer, more transparent, and more secure.
(Alba Ciudad) by Luigino Bracci with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SF
Luigino Bracci
He is passionate about computer science since he was about 14 years old, at that age “a man gave me a small computer that he had bought in the eighties, of those that were connected to a television and had to be programmed to work (a Sinclair ZX81 ), and I really liked it.” On his political inclination, his parents were a great influence. “They were people of very humble origins, both emigrants, dissatisfied with injustice and inequality. But they were not militants of the left. I had many other influences, classmates in HS whose parents were on the left, as well as several teachers who were trained in the Pedagogical and gave us classes at a time as conflictive as it was the presidency of CAP and the military insurrection of Chávez ” He enrolled in the UCV and in 2006 he graduated in Computing, a career that he complements with popular communication in the digital field.
