Since I'm loving the fact that an indie animated film using open source software and a comparatively minuscule budget left mainstream animation studios in the dust recently, I figured I'd go back to sharing some hidden gems (no longer hidden now) from my usual trawling over at Youtube.
I love animated shorts. I love immersing myself in creativity and the arts in any form. Give me film, give me books, give me art, give me music. Just GIVE ME.
Anyway, here's a fun and really well-done short -- also made using Blender, the same open source software Gints Zilbalodis and his team used to make Flow:
This goes to show it's resources that impede creatives, whether or not it's funding or computers and whatever high-tech doohickies are part of them (no, I'm not technical by any stretch). If you have the talent, the vision, and the passion for something incredible and -- above all -- DIFFERENT and UNIQUE, a free software would get you going.
I mean, hell, I've seen mind-blowing photorealistic illustrations by artists from disadvantaged backgrounds using only either a ballpoint pen or a simple pencil.
In my recent visits to Tumblr, I also ran across this post that I just have to share here (text in boldface = my emphasis):
not to talk about flow again, but the thing is, a lot of people talk about independent film making and its importance etc, but it's hard to get more independent than flow this year
not only because it was made with a free and open source software anyone can use, not only because it beat competitors from major studios with an average of 3% of the budget they had, not only because it represented a country that had never won an oscar before, not only because it didn't have any star power involved, not only because it didn't come from a filmmaker with past history, not only because it was made by a small team...
but also because it's an animated movie
animators often get the short end of the stick in the entertainment industry and, for the past years, it was starting to look as if the only way to make an animated project happen was to sell your soul to a major studio and see your work transformed into what they need and how they want it marketed
especially for movies from outside the US, from non-English speaking countries, where insanely talented animators tend to be used as freelance cheap labor for major US studios or have to adapt as much as possible to fit into their market in order to find work
passion projects for animation seemed to only be reserved to the shorts category, or needed to be as high brow as humanly possible to be perceived as "high art" to be valued and, even in the spaces of the industry dedicated to the genre, the way in which awards are distributed are a poor reflection of the vast work animators do
it's major for this film to win awards, let alone the oscar, an award which is notably judged badly for animation and often prefers the marketable easy way out of voting rather than genuine interest
this movie used a resource that is open to anyone and, with good storytelling, made an oscar winning film
in a world in which art is constantly being attacked by capitalist greed, I'm happy that a movie with heart and little resources could do something like this, whether or not people care about the oscars anymore
And I'm so happy to hear Zilbalodis turn down suggestions for sequels to his film and also go on record about staying independent. THIS is what I've been hoping to hear about him moving forward after his success. To get sucked into the sequel mindset has corporate-executive-making-shareholders-jizz-in-their-underwear written all over it, and guess what. That's practically all we get from major American studios nowadays. I've already stopped watching Disney and Pixar* and never really got into Dreamworks stuff** (and I saw that The Wild Robot is getting a sequel, so...).
So I'm wishing all the up-and-coming artists struggling in the bloated shadows of major studios all the best of luck. I hope Flow's win inspires you or keeps those creative passion fires lit. I know I'm not the only one who's cheering you on.
* I'm only one person, of course, out of billions world wide.
** Ditto.
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