Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
You read it correctly, the open-source 3D creation software has made it to Hollywood. In fact, a film that made use of Blender won an Oscar. The film in question is "Flow," which is an animated feature that follows the mystical journey of a cat and his friends.
According to Blender, the film is the very manifestation of Blender's mission, where "a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide."
Recently, Francesco Siddi COO of Blender, had an interview with "Flow" directory Gints Zilbalodis. During that interview, Zilbalodis spoke to his migration to Blender.
"After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE. I started using the 2.8 beta or even alpha release,” he said. “It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender."
EEVEE stands for Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine and is Blender's real-time render engine that is focused on speed and interactivity.
Zilbalodis experimented with some game engines but found it difficult to create a workflow. For him, Blender was ideal and had every tool necessary to get the job done.
You can read the entire interview with Gints Zilbalodis in this official Blender blog post.
