And the Oscar goes to… Blender

How open-source community champion Gints Zilbalodis out-rendered Big Animation.

This year at USA’s Academy Awards, while many expected either Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot to win, the award for best animated feature went to Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow.

So, it was the Latvian artist (who conjured an animated feature film out of a fractional budget of roughly 3.5 million euros) who carried away the golden statuette — the charming story of a cat and its friends navigating a world of apocalyptic flooding. In contrast, Inside Out 2 cost $200 million, while The Wild Robot had a budget of $78 million. We will come to Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl that cost about $37 million — the final losing contender in the category (and my favourite) in a moment. Zibalodis’ victory in this category is the first for a film that hasn’t been produced by a major studio like Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks or Ghibli.

Gints Zibalodis’s rare perspective on tool selection

In an interview with Blender, Zibalodis explains his process:

I was excited to find that workflow in Blender, but in a more advanced way that gave me greater control. Speed is really important to me — not just in rendering but also in working with files, setting up lighting, and creating the overall look.

This quote showcases Zibalodis’ unique genius. In a hugely complicated, resource-intensive endeavor like animation, it is very important for a creator to be able to essentialize, problem-solve and zero in on details that really matter while ignoring others. In fact, this has been my complaint with the Adobe Suite’s increasingly slow and over-complicated features that have a tendency to hijack whatever process you have in mind to create work. The productivity gain that comes with a work platform’s robust build can be invaluable.

Coincidentally, I landed a gig a few weeks ago making short videos. Based on community advice, I chose to learn Blender and the support that existed, whether it was importing .gifs or when the sound sync was off, saved the day. There was a real chance that working in some other app could have frustrated a beginner like me to just give up.