Cat from Flow with Blender logo, cat floating in the water and staring forward Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five Image licensed under CC-BY-SA – https://flow.movie/

Free Blender 4.4 adds animation and video features, improves stability

It’s a great week for free and open-source media tools. Hot on the heals of GIMP 3.0 final, we get Blender 4.4. It’s labeled as focusing on stability, but the Blender contributors have packed a bunch of major animation, video, and UI features in there, too. Now, we can say this is the tool used in Oscar-winning films (Flow).

This artist is connecting Unreal, Ableton Live for production-grade visualizers

For all the ubiquity of Unreal Engine, a small handful of people are pushing the envelope of what Unreal can do as an audiovisual tool. With years of effects and animation production work under his belt, Zack Berwick is uniquely creative and inventive with the combo – and he’s sharing his approach, using Ableton Live, Max for Live, MIDI, OSC, and UE.

Peter Kirn - March 7, 2025

How Latvia’s Flow used open source Blender in Oscar animation win

Flow was the surprise of the Oscars: a true underground hit from Latvia’s writer/director Gints Zilbalodis. It’s beautiful, expressive, and intimate in a way that big-studio features are not. And it’s a triumph of making the tech operate on a human level, fully exploiting the free and open source Blender and its real-time render engine EEVEE.

Peter Kirn - March 6, 2025

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