Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.

Cycle's renders are beautiful, but 10 minutes per frame can be a hard sell... I wonder, if anybody tried rendering in cycles to output eevee's primitves. I remember that was one of the tricks that architecture rendering community used - just paint with lights in places that a full blown global rendering/path tracing would do.

I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm?

Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

Weren't Blender working on a more efficient cycles renderer?

I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks.

The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don't even have anti-aliasing and the things look "blocky".

I hope this thing won because of the story and characters, and not its visuals.

Honestly yeah it won't be "perfect" but neither is a videogame being rendered in real time and it looks pretty good

Since they're not going crazy with effects it seems like a good compromise

A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers

I feel like it kind of fits in the same category as Hundreds of Beavers (also a fantastic film), as something using the roughness of low-cost methods as a genuine part of the artistic style.

Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!"

It's not about the textures and shadows.

The shaky camera is a deal breaker for me. Doesn't matter if it's animated or not, TV series or film. Shaky camera is an instant switch off for me.

Weird, my actual 10 year old was quickly bored and lost interest.

Interesting. I loved Flow and I'm glad the stars aligned for it on this particular occasion. This article [1] lists a bunch of other Oscar-related firsts:

* Gints Zilbalodis, who is 30 years old, is the youngest director to win the Oscar for best animated feature.

* Flow is the first fully-European produced and funded film to win the feture animation Oscar.

* Flow is the first dialogue-less film to win the feature animation Oscar.

* Flow, made for under $4 million, is by far the lowest-budget film to ever win the category.

It also says the winner of the animated short category, In the Shadow of the Cypress, was unexpected since the Iranian filmmakers couldn't do any of the usual in-person campaigning of Academy voters due to visa problems.

[1] https://www.cartoonbrew.com/awards/underdogs-win-latvias-flo...

A couple things:

1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.

2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.

3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.

If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.

I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?

I would guess this is, to some degree, a generational shift. The Animated category has only existed for ~30 years and was born from the resentment many in the academy felt toward Beauty and the Beast being nominated alongside supposedly serious films for Best Picture. Each generation following that one has grown up with a more diverse slate of animated films available.

The Oscars are the slowest possible reflection of social change, and I’m sure the perspective you share is still held my many members, but this win holds out some hope for sure.

The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category.

I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all.

So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.

I adored Flow. It's hard to say it was truly "better" than Inside Out 2. I think part of the calculation has to be that everyone expected Pixar to deliver something top notch so it only really met expectations. Flow was made by a no-name team from Latvia and was really something unique and interesting. I went into it kinda blind with no expectations and was blown away.

Flow was a critical favorite, sometimes that matters at the Oscars.

They aren't required to watch them, but the voters do all get screeners. They at least have the opportunity to watch it, regardless of whether they've seen it in the theater. They don't vote just for what they've heard of.

The Academy has a reputation for seeking "artistic merit" even at a cost of good entertainment. They're hoping to advance something that didn't do well at the box office. Sometimes that means giving awards to films that turn out to be dogs, but sometimes they manage to promote things that deserve attention.

A lot of Oscar-bait gets a small release at the end of the year, to qualify it for the Oscars. If it gets a nomination, they'll use that as part of a wider campaign later. That's why they send out screeners: they know that many members won't have had a chance to see it in the theater.

Could they have heard of it en masse because of its success at the Golden Globes?

Almost reminiscentof Hitchcock only using intertitles sparingly, instead letting the images convey the story.

"I would like to thank Blender, and Flexo, and Fry."

What do people mean with technically impressive? There are Blender renders that look quite incredible though and you just cannot differentiate it from real picture anymore

Example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a...

There are probably some flaws here as well, but you need to study the picture in detail. And Flow used the fast renderer of Blender, not the quality one.

Still, it does have a unique style that is much more interesting than many other animated movies. So what is technically impressive, just throwing more compute at it to make it photorealistic?

I think art style will have a larger impact. In a way it is technically impressive as it didn't need a lot of compute power.

No kidding, Shrek probably had to do with 100x less computing (per hour) than a modern production. First Toy Story probably something like 1000x less computing

We did come a long way

Blender comes with two renderers: Cycles for production rendering, and Eevee for near-real time preview.

This movie was rendered with the latter.

Like any 3D package, you can also install other renderers.

So any perceived deficit in picture quality here is more to do with budget than some limitation of Blender.

Take a look at the earlier concepts / renderings for Shrek! Before the studio gutted the team(?) and told everyone to pull their heads in. Absolutely off-putting.

there are parts of Flow that definitely look incredible imo

You may not care, and you don't have to, but certainly it means a lot to the Blender Foundation, who for 23 years have been actively working on something free & open-source, and now finally it is in the big leagues.

Just as Flow's win looks even more impressive when you look at the films it competed against, who produced them, and what resources they had, Blender has been a project competing for parity and to be taken seriously while remaining totally free, and going up against systems that are either wildly expensive or not available outside the studio that made it at all.

Flow is not good because it was made with Blender, but Blender is proven to be very good and in that top echelon because Flow was made with it. For those who make or use Blender, this is big. Those folks have already believed for years/decades that Blender was great and serious, but now a lot more people outside that circle will know this, too.

> I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive.

It's pretty impressive to me that something of Flow's quality could be created with free software that's avilable to anyone with an internet connection. There are a lot of highly creative people out in the world without massive amounts of money for expensive hardware/software. It's exciting for the future of animation, and I hope all the news stories talking about Flow being made with Blender will inspire more people to give it a try and see what they can do with it.