Let’s recap yet another successful Annecy experience for the Blender team. This year we had a corner booth at the film market, a short film selected in the festival, and a studio meet-up event in the city center.
The film market went well. At this point everyone is well aware of Blender’s existence, and there is a growing amount of professional users successfully tackling more and more complex challenges with the software.
I had informal conversations with several high-budget film directors and story artists using and praising Blender for the story development process. Adoption into the production pipeline is still slow for large organization, while in smaller, younger and more agile studio, using Blender at the core is simply the norm. From those studios, there is an active interest in the Blender Studio Tools a set of scripts, add-ons and documentation aimed at facilitating collaborative work in a Blender-centric environment.
There has been a growing trend in the past few years, where individuals and teams come by to share the work in progress on their production, or to let us know that the production was successfully completed. This year, several production were selected and screened at the festival – also winning awards. Congratulations to FLOW (feature film, 4 Awards), The car that came back from the sea (short film, 2 awards), Pictoplasma “opener 2023” (1 award), and The Worlds Divide (feature film).
The Blender for Breakfast event was a great opportunity to create connections between professionals and get a glimpse of the growing Blender-based studio landscape. Will definitely repeat next year.
Finally, special thanks to Dell for supporting us with a demo workstation during the event, so we could present high quality demos of the brushstroke technology from the Gold project, and more.
Blender is truly making it possible for filmmakers to create and share excellent work. See you next time!