Straume (Flow) - An Oscar and Golden Globe winning film

Flow has become a national treasure of Latvia! We are beyond proud of the incredible achievements the guys and gals have reached! It is the first time a film from Latvia has succeeded to this level and won the most prestigious awards in cinema: Oscar for Best Animated Feature and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film!

The story of Flow is especially remarkable since Latvia does not have a huge film industry. The financial support for films is tiny in comparison to other countries, not to mention Hollywood. A saying in Latvian comes to mind - mazs cinītis gāž lielu vezumu. That roughly translates to - the tiny bump flips the big carriage. The meaning of it is: that to achieve greatness, you do not always have to be a giant yourself. I imagine the small team of Flow probably felt like they were amongst giants at times, yet they found a way, they found the flow against all the odds and limitations to the highest heights.

When we go to the cinema to watch a film, most of us probably do not think about what techniques or tools were used in the creation process, right? Unless one is interested in the technicalities and wants to know as much as possible before seeing the end result. Usually, it happens the other way around. You are impressed with the end result and then go looking at how it was achieved.

As Flow began riding the wave of success, winning award after award, every news outlet in the country and people on social media started sharing more and more information about the unique ways it came to life. I learned early on that the entire film was created in Blender! That was even before I saw it on the big screen myself.

What is Blender, and what is so significant about it? Blender is free and open-source. You can even download it right now and begin learning to create things in 3D, the same as Gints Zilbalodis did when he started making Flow, with the limited budget he had. And as it turns out, the big film companies do not work with Blender for various reasons. I found this guy making a pretty compelling case as to why in his video about it. But because Blender is open-source, it is also highly customizable to your needs with a little bit of help from a developer who knows how to code, or you can even make some things with the endless tutorials available online today, which is exactly what Gints opted for. Pretty inspiring, right?! Blender’s wiki even happily promotes Flow in the second paragraph of their page now and has a screencap from Flow on their startup screen of its latest version! ^^

So, yes! I went to see the film with those eyes!