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Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

reuters.com

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Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#101

Post by zimpenfish »

chillee wrote: post #38
tzs wrote: post #9

That's kind of surprising. Academy members are not required to watch all the nominees for Best Animated Feature before voting. In fact they are not require to watch any of them. Several years ago I remember that after a year where the movie that won best animated was not the one that those in the animation industry overwhelming thought was sure to win some animation industry magazine survived Academy members asking w…

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 - Fl…

> Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.

Exactly the same as Inside Out 2 then?

(I'm guessing it was far more than Flow but less than Inside Out 2?)

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#102

Post by tootie »

autoexec wrote: post #60
riffraff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think inside out 2 was a very good movie. It had good ideas but didn't do very well with them (contrary to the first movie, which was great). I'm not surprised a movie which wasn't "just a sequel" managed to beat Moana and IO2.

I was also disappointed by inside out 2. I thought it followed the story beats of the first one a bit too closely. Flow was the better film.

This is my point though. Inside Out 2 suffered from high expectations. If Pixar never existed and Inside Out 2 came from an unknown studio it would have blown you away.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#103

Post by elaus »

FpUser wrote: post #99
dkh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

Look, I am in no way trying to diminish work developers put in Blender. It is great product. I saw videos made in Blender that looks way better than Flow from the tech point of view. My point was that the value of Flow is in its story, both written and visual and far overshadows any technical aspect. Avatar for example is totally opposite from that point of view in my opinion. Great graphics and absolutely meh, story…

And the value of Blender (or any 3D rendering software) is not only the fidelity of the rendered result, but the tools it gives artists to transform their vision into something that can be rendered by a computer.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#104

Post by lucasoshiro »

guelo wrote: post #52
thatswrong0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isn’t there to get? it’s a dead simple concept

How? I feel like I'm being trolled. None of it makes sense. There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins, weird whale-like creatures, some kind of being sucked up into heaven thing that happens to the stork-like bird. I've seen people online trying to put it into a sensible plot but it's so heavy on made up symbolism that to me it's bullshit.

> There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins

And that's the point. Perhaps you didn't like the movie because you are used to movies that every single detail needs to have a meaning and you were expecting that everything would be eventually explained. In this movie, things just happen and its story is not about them, but about how the characters react to them. Just like real life.

Specially for animals like the main characters. From a perspective of a pet, it's unexplained why its owners leave and return to their homes everyday at the same time; it's also unexplained why they can't pee everywhere. But they can manage to follow their lives and adapt to those unexplained facts without needing to understanding them.

And for me, this is what makes this movie great. It puts me in that perspective of an animal in a human world, where nothing really seems to make sense and it's pointless to try to find a meaning. And that's the opposite of where we try to give a human perspective of what happens in their lives.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#105

Post by lucasoshiro »

eurekin wrote: post #56
guelo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? I feel like I'm being trolled. None of it makes sense. There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins, weird whale-like creatures, some kind of being sucked up into heaven thing that happens to the stork-like bird. I've seen people online trying to put it into a sensible plot but it's so heavy on made up symbolism that to me it's bullshit.

I haven't seen the movie, but based solely on your comment, it reminds me of how Miyazaki films are often described—full of fantastical, otherworldly wonders that evoke the joy of exploring the unknown.

It really has a Ghibli-like feeling. I found that it has the same dream-like feeling that Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron have.

And that discomfort that the commenter felt is what I felt when watching Ghibli for the first time.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#106

Post by [deleted] »

FpUser wrote: post #99
dkh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

Look, I am in no way trying to diminish work developers put in Blender. It is great product. I saw videos made in Blender that looks way better than Flow from the tech point of view. My point was that the value of Flow is in its story, both written and visual and far overshadows any technical aspect. Avatar for example is totally opposite from that point of view in my opinion. Great graphics and absolutely meh, story…

[deleted]

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#107

Post by stvltvs »

agumonkey wrote: post #53
stvltvs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, grew up on cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc. Looking at them now, they are laughably bad in most respects, but they sparked our imaginations and didn't need to be sophisticated to do it.

yes, there's a balance to get and visual "perfection" is nothing real, even star wars had blunders and visibly lesser tricks, but the whole created a deep sense of wonder and you got along

The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#108

Post by agumonkey »

stvltvs wrote: post #107
agumonkey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, there's a balance to get and visual "perfection" is nothing real, even star wars had blunders and visibly lesser tricks, but the whole created a deep sense of wonder and you got along

The Star Wars trilogy wasn't great cinema, but the amount of time we spent playing with improvised light sabers and trying to move objects with the Force attests to the imaginative possibilities behind it.

it was visually ground breaking though, and there was something strange because if you look at movies of that era, a lot of attempts at space action fantasy existed, but they all looked crudely crafted and not believable. there was an alignment of talent, from VFX to audio, to music that made the whole thing hold

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#109

Post by qwertox »

Also thanks to Ton Roosendaal. Creating the Blender Foundation and starting the "Free Blender"-campaign with the hopes of getting Blender to where it is now is something I was doubting if it would ever work out. And it did. Blender is one of those gems in the OSS ecosystem.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#110

Post by zo1 »

jsheard wrote: post #12

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but havin…

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.

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