In case you missed the Oscars last weekend, the Best Animated Feature award went to Flow, an amazingly beautiful, even heartbreaking movie which beat out big budget entries like Disney/Pixar's Inside Out 2 and Universal Pictures' The Wild Robot.
Even more amazing, Flow was made by a small team of artists using Blender, the free open source 3D platform that a lot of people reading these words already use in their own creative work. (Watch above.)
Film industry concept artist David Southen (previously interviewed here) just made a very good point about Flow versus the many proprietary, heavily VC-funded gen AI platforms like Midjourney and Sora:
I don't think people realize how incredible it is that a movie rendered in nearly real-time in free software on a single computer just won the Oscar for best animated film. If there was ever any proof you don't need AI, this is it.
This is very true. And what's notably great about "Flow" is the aesthetics are very unique to itself. It's reminiscent in tone to a Miyazaki movie, but the world and characters are quite charmingly their own original thing. In other words, you could not make Flow with Sora, Midjourney etc., which can only extrude images based on an aggregate of previously existed.
Unless -- or maybe, inevitably -- these platforms ingested Flow without the artists' consent so people could make mediocre knockoffs of Flow.
But people who do that will never, ever get to take their Oscar trophy for a celebratory burger at In-n-Out.
(But if you go, get the double-double animal style with chopped chilies. Trust me.)
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