Blender has come a long way… and ever since, the main goal was, to create a software, which is free but nevertheless still professional and capable of some serious production pipeline work. Therefore the Blender open movie project is releasing a new short film, entirely made with Blender, each year, integrating also the latest features and tools of the current version. First, to proof, what Blender is technically capable of, comparing it also to giants like Autodesks Maya, at the same time demonstrating to the artists that they can achieve similar quality results and do full feature animated films with a free software! And second, to accelerate the development of Blender even further.
I’m a big fan of the Blender open movies in general. They tend to push themselves in unknown territories therefore speed up the development of Blender in a nice and practical way. Because each open movie focusses on a different aspect of development. “Tears of Steel” for example pushed hard on the vfx part of Blender, including the further development of motion tracking, masking and photorealistic rendering…
The Blender Institute
The Blender Institute was established by Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal in 2007 and focusses on creating these open movies entirely made within Blender. Since then, and after the amazing success of their first open movie “Elephants Dream”, they released 13 open movies, with their newest being “Sprite Fright”.
Elephants Dream was also the one, which put Blender on the radar of many pro users and helped it to the success we’re experiencing today! In fact the Blender Institute became quickly the place, which brought Blender artists and developers together and developed itself into a permanent studio and office.
In 2020 they split it into the Institute and the Blender Studio, giving it it’s own space, to focus entirely on the open movie projects. Blender studio is not only the place, where open movies are born, but they’re also working on a complete production pipeline, for independent production of feature animation films, being also free and open source.
26 full time employees and 12 freelancers are currently helping out, to achieve that goal and to drive the development of our beloved tool.
All open movies at one place
Did you know that you can watch all open movies at one place, namely the Blender Studio film archive? Like a Netflix only for Blender open movies…
And even better! With behind the scenes and some background information you won’t get on youtube!
So it’s definitely worth a look! 🙂
That’s it for today. Hope you learned something new, have fun watching the open movies and happy blendering! 😀