20 years of Open Movies: what’s next?

This year we celebrate two decades of making Open Movies. With 17 projects released, we have seen this initiative become more recognized and valued by the community. The Open Movies themselves have grown in quality and ambition, and their impact on Blender development has grown with them. How do we make sure that this work stays relevant in the upcoming years? What can the Studio do that continues to drive Blender forward, serve our members, and inspire filmmakers everywhere?

Past and Present

Over the years, Open Movie productions evolved from being tightly linked to feature development toward deeper artistic exploration. In the last five years, that scope has expanded further. We focused on collaboration, production pipelines, and tools that help teams deliver bold creative visions without compromising artistic intent.

With each Open Movie release, we continued to prove that a small team with a clear direction and a solid pipeline can do remarkable work with free and open-source software. By pushing technical boundaries and documenting what each project teaches us, Blender Studio produced a lot of educational content and worked on making Blender a better tool for artists worldwide, in cooperation with the Blender developers.

Going beyond the short form

After exploring the short form for years, learning and sharing so many lessons about working in that format, we are looking into the next challenge: developing a feature film. Working in long-form comes with different challenges. One of them is funding. However, many outstanding films produced by independent teams prove this barrier can be overcome.

There is another challenge that has not been addressed yet: access to tools for feature-scale collaboration and production knowledge that comes with them. Such things tend to stay in-house. Studios build pipelines from scratch and tailor them from project to project to target specific needs, but that expertise rarely becomes accessible to a wider audience.

This is exactly the knowledge and technology gap Blender Studio wants to tackle next. We want to make a shared reference out of an open, documented feature-scale production for everyone to learn from, reuse, or build on.

Why now?

There is clear demand for original, human-made content that can stand out in a sea of remakes and generative visual noise. We wish to provide a practical answer to the question: how do you stay efficient and true to the craft in the current media landscape?

A practical answer requires a real example, and a feature film project perfectly fits the purpose. As an outcome, everyone will get an open and well-documented production pipeline for effective work within small teams. That way, instead of starting from scratch, the independent community of filmmakers will always have a Blender Studio "playbook" to study, reference, and build on for their own work. Along the way, Blender Studio will work with Blender developers on features and targets that matter in real production, aligned with the wider development roadmap.

If you've followed Blender Studio for a while, the idea of working on a feature-scale project won't sound new. Two previous attempts, Cosmos Laundromat and Agent 327, didn't move forward for different reasons. The world has changed since then, and so has Blender Studio -- in reach, in capability, and in what the community expects from us. Whether this is the right next step is not something we want to decide alone.

What's necessary

For the plan to work, two things are needed: a film concept strong enough to hold up at feature scale, and a community that wants us to get it done.

On the concept side, the studio team has been developing a feature film idea for a while. We've been working on the initial concept for months and are currently wrapping up the exploration phase for a public presentation in July. Along with the reveal, we will also provide specific details about the production knowledge we plan to develop and share with the community.

On the support side, both current subscribers and new supporters are needed to make this possible. Your subscriptions help us keep building in the open: developing the tools, workflows, and production knowledge that studios around the world can apply to real projects. Support also gives us a clear signal that our subscribers want us to take the next step. The future of Blender Studio, and the scale of what comes next, depends directly on community backing.

At Blender Studio, we believe artists should have access to open collaboration tools and production insights. Bringing that knowledge to feature-film scale can help answer the productivity pressure of an industry that keeps pushing toward faster, cheaper, less human output.

Do you believe in this too? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Apart from thinking about the big picture, Blender Studio has some regular activities already in motion. The free Blender Fundamentals course will soon receive updates in the animation section and the team is preparing to start production on Cowboi, a new animated short.