When Flow won its best Animation Oscar in 2025, director Gints Zilbalodis’ predicted that Blender, the free animation software used to make the movie, would revolutionise filmmaking, allowing young creatives to make exciting films with limited resources.
We’ve already seen signs of that happening with movies like Backrooms, which began as a Blender animation, but the hurdles of time, resources and a steep learning curve remain. Until now, Blender Studio, the Blender Foundation’s production arm, has been helping by developing short open movies, for which it shares documentation and project files so users can learn from the process.
Now it wants to expand that initiative with something far more ambitious: a full feature-length movie.
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Concept art for the Blender Studio movie Overgrown (Image credit: Blender Studio)
Blender Studio’s Overgrown would be co-directed by Hjalti Hjálmarsson and Rik Schutte. Early visual development artwork shows a post-human, robo-apocalyptic world reclaimed by nature. In this setting, a hedgehog and raccoon duo cling on for survival, embarking on what Blender describes as an adventure involving hardship, wonder and personal transformation.
This project wouldn’t be only about making the film, but also about documenting and sharing the production process and knowledge. Progress updates would be provided on the Blender Studio blog, and Blender would create documentation and productivity tools for feature-film pipelines so that other animators don’t have to start from scratch.
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The result would be a “free, open source playbook for creating large-scale animated productions”, it says.
“We want to see filmmakers worldwide building on top of it and steering the industry back to human-forward art with a heart. It’s possible to be productive today while staying true to the craft, and the production of a feature film is Blender Studio’s way to prove it,” it states in the announcement.
More visual development work for Blender’s Overgrown (Image credit: Blender Studio)
Character design for Blender’s Overgrown (Image credit: Blender Studio)
As a non-profit Blender needs funds to make the movie happen. Its aim is to get the ball rolling via the Blender Studio subscription plan. It currently has 5,182 subscribers paying from €11.50 per month. It calculates that it needs 7,000 to be able to take the project to the market and begin looking for potential buyers and distributors. It hopes to reach that goal by the end of September.
The plan is to use a 20/80 funding model. Blender Studio would raise 20% through subscriber support to cover visual development and all the software and pipeline work needed to get the movie going.
The result of the early visual development would then be used to bring in an external producer or distributor willing to finance the remaining 80%. This way, the Blender community would fund only the part of the process that it’s most interested in, while the heavy production lift would be externally financed.
If it advances, the project could provide an exciting new model for the funding and creation of animated movies – one that helps original creative ideas get off the ground before receiving major backing while also allowing the animation community to benefit from the knowledge and tools built up during the process.
You can find out more on the Blender Studio website.
Need the gear for your own project? See our guide to the best laptops for animation.