Blender Flow
“Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. There is great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries.”
I saw the animated film Flow recently, from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis. The movie is a visual feast for which I can’t think of any existing comparison. The last time I experienced something this fresh in theaters, this little guy hopped on screen for the first time, broke the 4th wall, and Toy Story ushered in the unprecedented era of computer animation via Pixar and DreamWorks.
In listening to and reading interviews with Gints about his creative process and the technologies he relies on, I was struck by just how thoroughly Flow is a product of two tenets recognizable across many versions of innovation on the periphery, including tech startups: powerfully open-source and creativity from constraints. In combination on Flow, these two elements provided unbridled experimentation and open, intentional collaboration, through a designed environment that evinced breakthroughs.
Powerfully Open Source
Flow is the first feature-length animated film to completely made in Blender, a 3D computer graphics software. First and foremost, Blender is an extremely powerful product suite, it a deep-frontier tech leader, consistently releasing some of the most dynamic new capabilities at the edge of the $35B 3D computer graphics industry. With Blender, Gints could visualize and experiment in his imagined environment much earlier on in development:
“I can take the virtual camera and explore, almost like location-scouting in a live action movie. I need to go through that process and try different things. It’s a very spontaneous and kind of intuitive process. It also has a real-time render engine, EEVEE, which means you can actually see what you’re making—you don’t have to wait for the rendering to see all the lights, textures, fog, and effects.” [i]
Equipped with a creative canvas that provides frictionless trial and error of potential shots and angles in real-time with no additional cost. This is the live-action equivalent of digital cameras introducing immediate playback on set, supplanting the rote process of waiting for printed dailies in traditional filmmaking. Blender is also free and open source, which was critical in creating Flow. The technical and creative teams on the film could develop bespoke tools on top of Blender’s foundational code:
“Blender is very customizable, we were able to build tools within Blender to realize unique elements in our film, in particular water. People say to avoid water because it can be really hard to get it into the right shape that you want. With Blender we built one tool for when the ocean is very active and a completely different system for an underwater scene, or for a puddle, or just a splash of water. I think it’s amazing that there’s a feature film of this scope being made on a software that anyone can just try out for themselves. I could travel and work on the film on my laptop without a crazy workstation.” [ii]
There are many established 3D graphics modeling products, including AutoDesk Maya, Houdini, and ZBrush. The majority are closed source systems, slow to innovate and offering minimal customization. Gints switched from Maya to Blender for its superior technology, its open-source malleability, and for the emergent network of technologists and animators building with, around, and on top of Blender.
“In 2020, we secured some funding, and I moved into a co-working studio space with other artists and developers who were using Blender. That’s where I connected with Mārtiņš Upītis and Konstantīns Višņevskis. It quickly became clear Mārtiņš had a deep expertise in water. He’d had already been researching water simulations and eventually developed a Blender add-on for water effects. Konstantīns was a Blender super-user and was much more technical than me, so I could ask him for advice. He did a lot of the rigging and handed smaller simulations like splashes.” [iii]
Community is perhaps the most underappreciated value accelerator that’s commonplace in open-source offerings catching fire. Impossible to fake and earned over time, a passionate, involved community advances capability, shared understanding, and shared contribution in a step-function vortex that’s further propelled by the compounding nature of affinity for and familiarity with the brand behind the technology.
This was literally true with Flow, where core members of the movie’s creative and production team came organically from Blender’s active community. Several contributors have gone on to build powerful add-ons for purchase in the Blender marketplace. If open source can create a limitless, supercharged blank canvas to rapidly explore and experiment, a passionate and involved community can play an essential part to fan the sparks, and even guide development as direction takes shape.
Creativity from Constraints
Like many indie films, Flow had a tiny production budget: $3.5M total. For comparison, another 2024 Oscar-nominated, animated film – the studio feature sequel Inside Out 2 – had a $200M production budget. So how could something as groundbreaking as Flow result? By not just learning to do more with less, but seeing what may be less through one lens, for the more it may bear through another.
“Storytelling offers infinite possibilities, but sometimes constraints can be beneficial. For example, deciding to use only four characters and a handful of locations can lead to stronger creative choices. Having fewer resources was helpful too, because we had to focus, we couldn’t make any big changes late in the process.” [iv]
The examples of creativity from constraints are myriad in creative industries. Like the accelerative nature of open-source, creativity from constraints rings true for entrepreneurs and founders as it does for filmmakers. In fact, the dynamic could be said to be the elemental purpose of startups at their foundation. Of course, the parallels between startup founder and filmmaker are only so many. Where a movie is a temporal start-to-finish process with a bespoke end product, building a company takes place over stages of evolution and growth. Learning to embrace, seeking out, or artificially build structures of constraint in one form or another are a means of recreating early ideation environments that foster innovative sparks, once a company is in manifest motion towards growing into itself.
“I think it’s valuable for filmmakers to collaborate with tool developers early on to understand which things are challenging and which are easy. This can actually spark a continuum of creative ideas throughout production rather than feeling like an ongoing limitation.” [v]
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Just as many of Blender’s frontier innovations are products of its earned open-source community, Flow is sine qua non Blender. Without it, Flow may not have ever been made.
Go watch Flow!
Gints’ Quote Links:
[i] Gints Zilbalodis, Hollywood Reporter Interview, 10.13.24
[ii] Gints Zilbalodis, Fast Company Interview, 11.22.24
[iii] Gints Zilbalodis, Blender Blog Interview, 1.22.25
[iv] Gints Zilbalodis, Roundtable Interview, Hollywood Reporter, 1.9.25
[v] Gints Zilbalodis, Blender Blog Interview, 1.22.25