Blender breaks barriers in cinema as Flow wins big at the Oscars with open-source animation 

There is no doubt that the animated adventure movie, Flow, is a huge award season hit. Nominated across categories in approximately 40 events, the film won awards in most of the categories it was nominated for. The film also won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the annual event on March 2, 2025. The win was a record-breaking and history-making feat for a Latvian project.

That being said, there is likely one major detail of Flow's shooting process that not everyone knows about. The animation of the movie was completely created with Blender, an open source and free-to-use software.

Now that the movie has gained immense popularity among the audience and critics, the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, and musician of the film, Gints Zilbalodis, is speaking with the people at Blender and discussing the making of the movie and how their software helped in it.

Gints Zibalodis talks about Blender and Flow in recent interview

As previously mentioned, Gints Zibalodis created Flow almost entirely using the open-source software Blender. He used the software to convert still images into animation.

Zibalodis shared insights regarding this during an interview with Blender for their article published on January 22, 2025. He spoke about his transition to the software after initially experimenting with other software such as Maya. He said:

"I decided to switch to Blender in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE. I started using the 2.8 beta or even alpha release. 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."

He also spoke about EEVE, Blender's real-time render engine, which is focused on speed and interactivity and spoke about how it assisted him in achieving the desired output. He said:

"EEVEE was interesting to me because, even my first feature Away, it was all playblasted, which is not like proper rendering, rather it’s like previews. I was excited to find that workflow in Blender, but in a more advanced way that gave me greater control."

Zibalodis also shared that speed was a very crucial part of his job. He emphasized that this not only applies while rendering but also to other areas like working with files, lighting setup, and the overall appearance. He added:

"I like to work on multiple aspects at the same time; for example, when setting up the camera, I also need lights in place because lighting influences camera placement and how the scene looks. That’s why EEVEE was so appealing to me...And Blender was ideal: it had all the tools I needed."

How did Gints Zibalodis learn to use Blender?

Based on the interview published on Blender's website, Gints Zibalodis taught himself how to use Blender by browsing the internet. However, he revealed that there were some aspects of the software that he was unable to understand.

This is where Konstantīns Višņevskis and Mārtiņš Upītis proved to be useful. He met both of them when he moved to a shared working studio space while developing Flow. Zibalodis revealed that they were among the numerous artists and developers who were using Blender and, therefore, he decided to seek assistance.

Though both Konstantīns and Mārtiņš assisted Gints Zibalodis in the simulations for the movie, the latter particularly reached out to Konstantīns when he needed a script for automating an animation.

Flow is currently streaming on Max.

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