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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

If you go to the blender.org and download Blender 4.4 you will be greeted with this image.



As you can see this is Blender. But in the middle there is a frame from a Best Animated Feature Oscar winner Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis.

I don't know if you know but Flow was in fact done using Blender. At the 2024th Blender Conference the head of the animation department on the film Silly-Pélissier Léo even presented a talk about this. ( available on PeerTube )

Let that sink in.

Based on the Wikipedia about the director, originally Zilbalodis was making animated shots ( and one other feature film ) using Autodesk Maya, but then something happened. Blender got EEVEE. So he decided that he wants to make a movie with EEVEE now. For those of you who don't see how absolutely insane that is, EEVEE is the engine I'm using for Dani's Race ( a game ).

Based on the presentation by Silly-Pélissier Léo, Gints Zilbalodis is a one person powerhouse. He didn't just direct the movie. He also scored it. And apparently, if I'm not misunderstanding the presentation, he was the one who designed the rigs and the models and even animated the camera and layout of the entire picture. Then a group of 20 animators in France basically took that rough movie and added animation fidelity to everything.

And yet I have a fake plastic Oscar in my room while Gints Zilbalodis has a real one now. I should have made Moria's Race a feature film.

Zilbalodis is a surprisingly good director. He is not particularly Spielberg like. I would describe his approach as sort of if you take Spielberg and mix him well with Alfonso Cuarón ( the director of Children of Men ). Zilbalodis likes to use long shots everywhere, but unlike Cuarón, Zilbalodis doesn't draw your attention to the fact that the shots are long, like Spielberg does. The compositions and blocking ( and camera ) are amazingly on point. Very complex stuff that gives my director brain a huge shot of very needed dopamine. Thank you very much.

In the whole movie there were like one or two shots that were not 100% perfect. Those two shots had minor directorial imperfections. They were 90% perfect. But the rest of the film was pretty perfect.

The film is stupidly smart. If only I could be smart enough to think to make a film with animals that don't say a word. On Moria's Race the biggest problem was the voices of the kids. Zilbalodis avoided the whole problem, and also avoided a need to do any translations to the film, by having zero lines of dialogue in it. It's kind of like No One Will Save You ( the aliens horror film by Brian Duffield ) but without the one line of dialogue. And yes, Flow is kind of intense. It's kind of like a post-apocalypse environmental thriller for kids.

The film is kind of depressing to be honest. Like it seems like it's about a time in future when all humans died. And only animals remain. Kind of like that game about a cat Stray but without the sci-fi stuff. The timelines alight to suggest Stray could be a direct inspiration for Flow.

I sort of don't know what I feel about the painterly style. Everybody these days are trying to make animated films more animated. I reviewed the new Predator movie recently who went for the same vibe. An interesting thing though, Flow is not animated on-twos. At some point, as far as I understand, there was a discussion of whether to animate the movie on-twos. But due to the directing style of Zilbalodis and his constant camera movement, the movie is actually animated with full frame-rate all the way through. Which makes it, in my opinion, stupidly amazing!

I do think the movie deserves the Oscar. And I am excited about the next project by Zilbalodis. Based on Wikipedia it's called Limbo... Is he making a film adaptation of the game Limbo? In any case...

Happy Hacking!!!

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@blenderdumbass And, it seems it will be released on DVD in September! :-)

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