originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/776664...
animation night, coughing and spluttering: stop piling dirt on me! i’m still alive you bastards!!
Hey everyone! We’ve been on unofficial hiatus for a good few weeks, but I’m not done yet with streaming animated films illegally on Twitch.tv. And tonight I have a real treat!
At the Annecy film festival last year, I had the opportunity to watch Flow (Straume), a beautiful, wordless film about a cat trying to survive a sudden, mysterious flood in a world the humans abandoned, full of giant strange statues. At first timid, the cat grows into itself as it finds companions on its journey in a random assortment of animals - a capybara, a secretary bird and a lemur among them. Charming, numinous, full of characterful animal-performances and entirely animated in Blender, the film absolutely stole my heart - and indeed the jury’s uh. collective heart.
Well, luckily for me, I now have the chance to show it to you!
Flow is directed by Gints Zilbalodis, of Latvia, who can be seen tiny on stage in this photo that I will self-indulgently include:
It has gone on to sort of completely outshine every other film made in Latvia at the box office. It is maybe the biggest sign that Blender has ‘made it’ in the film industry, and as such, the Blender world is very excited about it - for example, here’s a pretty extensive interview with Zilbalodis where you can read about how it was put together over the course of five and a half years by a small Latvian team, eventually growing bigger with French and Belgian help.
Most remarkable to me is that such a pretty film was rendered entirely in Eevee, Blender’s PBR rasteriser, meaning final render times per frame could be as low as 0.5-10 seconds. Zilbalodis could compose shots in Blender with a previs, hand them off for painting and detailing by environment artists, and render the whole film on a single PC. Here’s a video about their workflow if you wanna spend an hour learning about how cats are like accordions:
I cannot wait to rewatch Flow and introduce more people to it. 2024 had a lot of great movies but this one’s really up there. But tonight I wanna do a little more than that, because this is not Zilbalodis’s first movie - even if it’s his first Blender movie - and I wanna get a sense of where this whole thing came from.
Before Flow came a number of short films (all of which can be seen on his vimeo). From the beginning we see an interest in stylised rendering, mixing 2D and 3D, and a strong sense for character acting. Before long he would switch from 2D animation to 3D stylised characters, and his shorts take on more complex composition and lighting.
This all led to the feature film Away (Prōjam), which is pretty damn remarkable because Zilbalodis made the 75-minute film almost singlehandedly: writing, directing, animating, creating the score and all the rest. Much like Flow, the film depicts a wordless journey through a strange environment, with stylised rendering (here more flat kagenashi-like shading than the fur shaders in Flow) and it’s got an animal (the bird that accompanies the main human character). And while it didn’t reach a wide audience, it seems to have struck a similar note with the people lucky enough to see it, who throw around words like ‘haunting’ and ‘transcendant’. Well, it’s on torrent sites, so let’s join that club!
There’s so much more that can be said about Zilbalodis and the themes that run through his films, but for now I will leave it at that. Tonight we’ll take a chronological tour, from his early shorts up through to Away and Flow. I’ll go live now and we’ll start the films in about half an hour at 8pm UK time - see you at twitch.tv/canmom!
Historical note: a few days after this Animation Night, Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Picture. But I was on it already!!!!
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