Technological advancements have been shaping filmmaking since the very beginning, but this process has sped up significantly of late. The availability, compatibility and scalability of modern digital tools now enable anyone with a creative vision and dedication to test their filmmaking or purely technical skills.

Gints Zilbalodis’ second animated feature, Flow [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Gints Zilbalodis
intervista: Red Carpet @ European Film…
scheda film] (2024), serves as a perfect example of what crossing a new frontier really means. It won an Oscar, the LUX Audience Award and the European Film Award for Best Animated Feature, on top of dozens more accolades, but it was created on a modest, €3.5 million budget by a small, predominantly freelance and decentralised, team consisting of largely first-timers on an animated feature project. What’s more, they used open-source tools to make it.

The 2025 edition of CineLink Industry Days dedicated a slot to the working methods behind this success story. With Igor Simić, of Demagog Studios, as a moderator, Konstantīns Višņevskis and Mārtiņš Upītis, co-founders of Physical Addons and members of the team of animators on Flow, shared their experience of working on such a project. The focus of their presentation was on how open-source tools like Blender and independent workflows allowed the team to stay flexible, efficient and dedicated to the goal of production over the course of five years, some of which overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both Višņevskis and Upītis come from an academic and professional background that mixes the artistic with the technical, and both hold teaching positions at art schools and universities. Višņevskis has experience working in the computer-game and VR industries, where he achieved the status of “rigging master” (rigging being another term for skeletal animation), while Upītis also worked in advertising, on TV commercials, and specialises in animating water. These two specific aspects and the combination of them proved to present the greatest challenges in this movie about a cat running away from water for most of its running time. Višņevskis summarised it with the quote: “The cat is basically fluid; it’s not easy to rig it.”

Working together, they often came to seemingly counter-intuitive conclusions, such as the fact that the same system could be used for animating weeds and fish. However, the simulations they ran taught them that, despite the overarching framework of photorealism, “lesser-quality versions often looked better than high-quality ones”, which can come in handy because “in feature films, you end up modifying the character endlessly”.

Using a set of video-game tools in Blender (it was originally intended that Flow would be made in the Unreal Engine) and making them work in an animated feature film was a long-term challenge. The rendering went on almost until the 2024 Cannes premiere, but, when asked about their experiences, the speakers said that they would not change a thing, looking back. They concluded, “What the digital camera did for movies, open-source software is currently doing for animation. […] Software is improving not just year by year, but month by month.”