Blender Studio Announces Ambitious Feature Film Project

With Overgrown, the team wants to build an open-source guide for creating large-scale animated productions.

Blender Studio

Blender Studio, the creative arm of the Blender project and a subscription-based platform, has spent years exploring the possibilities of the software and pushing its boundaries. Mostly known for its open-source short films, it has announced that it's ready for a new adventure: a feature film.

With Overgrown, Blender Studio hopes to build a "feature playbook", a collection of open-source tools and documentation for creating large-scale productions with Blender. This would open even more doors for Blender in filmmaking, as the software is already being used in major projects (and let's not forget the Oscar-winning film Flow). Ultimately, the goal is to "improve local and artist-centric creation, not depending on cloud services or generative AI."

"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."

Overgrown is co-directed by Hjalti Hjálmarsson and Rik Schutte, and it will reportedly feature a post-human, robo-apocalyptic world reclaimed by nature. Below are some visual development pieces from the film. As usual, all work in progress will be available on the Blender Studio blog.

Blender Studio

"The ultimate goal is to build a set of open source and well-documented productivity tools that can be combined into a feature-film pipeline. This way, instead of starting from scratch, the independent community of filmmakers will always have the Blender Studio 'playbook' to study, reference, and build on top of for their own projects.

We want small teams to be fully empowered to pursue ambitious creative ideas!"

To make it happen, Blender Studio needs more subscribers. The goal is to reach 7,000 subscribers by the beginning of September: that would provide the minimum financial support needed to take the project to the film market and begin searching for potential buyers and distributors.

Learn more about Overgrown and become a Blender Studio subscriber here.

The most recent Blender Studio projects include the open-source short film Singularity, Project Storm, a fully animation-ready character rig, and DOGWALK, a video game built using Godot.

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