If you’ve ever dabbled in 3D modeling, animation, or just tried to make a spinning digital donut for your YouTube channel, you’ve probably used Blender. Clocking in at over 30 years old, it is one of the most popular 3D animation programs on the planet and easily one of the most actively developed open-source projects ever created. It’s the little software engine that could—free as in beer, but actually good. In recent years, Blender has leveled up from a scrappy indie tool to a mature, heavy-hitting powerhouse. It has reached a level of sophistication where it is now regularly used by actual, legitimate animation studios. But the team behind the software isn’t just content writing code; they want to make movie magic of their own.
The Short Film Testing Ground
The Blender Foundation hasn’t just been building software; they’ve been battle-testing it. For roughly 20 years, starting with Elephants Dream, they have been producing short movie projects to push the limits of their own coding. In the two decades since that first experiment, Blender has produced 17 short movies.
Because they release these projects under a Creative Commons license, several of their films have taken on a bizarre second life. Big Buck Bunny, for example, has become the de facto, royalty-free video everyone uses to test video playback, TVs, and monitors. If you’ve bought a screen in the last decade, you’ve probably seen that giant, fluffy rabbit. To keep this creative momentum going, they created Blender Studio in 2014—a separate, dedicated team focused purely on producing these short films and creating top-tier training content for the community.
Ambitions for the Big Screen
It was only a matter of time before the industry took notice. In recent years, Blender has proven it is more than capable of handling the crushing demands of TV and feature film pipelines. The slick Netflix animated show Next Gen was produced almost entirely in Blender, and the acclaimed 2024 Academy Award-winning film Flow was animated and rendered using the software.
Seeing this success, the Blender Studio team realized they had their own ambitions to create a full-length feature film. They actually teased this dream back in 2017 with the release of Agent 327: Operation Barbershop. That delightful, action-packed short was originally planned as a proof-of-concept test for a massive feature film project. Sadly, the Hollywood stars didn’t align, and that feature ultimately never came to be. We got a taste of the appetizer, but the main course never arrived.
Cosmos Laundromat and Agent 327, the two Blender feature films that sadly never came to be
Enter “Overgrown” and the Funding Puzzle
Now, the Blender Studio team is officially ready to try again. They are mounting a brand-new feature film attempt with a project titled Overgrown. The team already has a solid concept locked down and has eagerly begun the “Visual Exploration” stage of the project.
More importantly, they aren’t just flying by the seat of their pants this time—they have a robust, grown-up plan for financing. The strategy is to have 80% of the budget provided by an external distributor. The remaining 20% of the funding is being crowdsourced through Blender Studio subscriptions. The community is already showing up in a big way, with more than 5,000 subscriptions secured out of their 7,000-subscriber goal.
There is one slight catch for the die-hard open-source purists, though. A quick look at the Blender Studio webpage reveals no mention of Overgrown being released as an “Open Movie Project.” While the team has firmly committed to releasing all of the new software tools and robust documentation developed during the film’s creation, the nature of having an external Hollywood financier means they apparently will not be releasing all of the production files to the public, as they have generously done with past shorts.
The initial concept art for Overgrown is here and it’s adorable as heck
The Final Render
The Blender Studio team is walking into this with over 20 years of hands-on production experience and 17 successful projects under its belt. They are undeniably in the best position they have ever been in to finally produce a feature-length project. Hopefully, they can smash through their subscription funding goals. We are incredibly excited to see the final film hit the big screen, but let’s be honest—we are even more excited for all the shiny new enhancements and features this movie will allow Blender to develop, which will eventually be made available to creators everywhere.
You can learn more about Overgrown and check out their progress at the official project webpage.
