This year’s Hollywood awards season has been a memorable one for fans and followers of open source – with everything from films like VFX blockbusters Dune: Part Two to animated indies like Flow earning recognition. The Academy Software Foundation is thrilled to congratulate all those who utilized open source technology to bring these stories to the big screen, especially our member companies and contributors!
Flow, the independent film directed by Gints Zilbalodis, made history by becoming the first Academy Award winner for Animated Feature Film to be made entirely with Blender, an open source 3D creation suite. The small filmmaking team behind Flow developed custom tools within Blender, such as water effects developed by Martin Upitis and stylized animal fur developed by Konstantins Visnevskis, to achieve standout visuals on a modest budget. The Blender Foundation is an ASWF member, and Blender uses multiple ASWF projects including OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, Open Shading Language, OpenImageIO, and MaterialX. Read more about Flow and Blender in this interview with Zilbalodis.
Additional award-winning and nominated films using open source include:
- Academy Award for Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two. DNEG, the lead visual effects studio on Dune: Part Two, leveraged open source tools including xSTUDIO, OpenColorIO, and OpenEXR to deliver close to 1,000 VFX shots on the sci-fi blockbuster. In addition to the Academy Awards, the film also led the photoreal field at the Visual Effects Society with four wins.
- VES Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature: The Wild Robot. Created by DreamWorks Animation, The Wild Robot utilized open source projects including OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenVDB, Rez, OpenUSD, and MoonRay to achieve the film’s painterly aesthetic. The Wild Robot earned four Visual Effects Society Awards, nine Annie Awards including Best Feature, the Critics Choice Award for Best Animated Feature, and was also nominated for three BAFTA awards and three Academy Awards including the Animated Feature Film category. Read more about the open source technology used on The Wild Robot on our deep dive here.
- Academy Award nominee, Animated Feature Film: Inside Out 2. Developed by Pixar Animation Studios, Inside Out 2 introduces viewers to the newest emotions wreaking havoc on heroine Riley Andersen – anxiety, envy, embarrassment, and ennui. Open source tools used on the film include OpenTimelineIO, OpenSubdiv, OpenUSD, Open Shading Language, MaterialX, Ptex, F3D, OpenVDB, TensorFlow, OpenColorIO, and OpenEXR. The film became both the highest-grossing film of 2024 and the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and was nominated for multiple awards ranging from the Golden Globes to the Academy Awards to the BAFTAs.
- VES Awards nominee, Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature: Moana 2. Disney’s Moana 2 crossed $1 billion at the box office on its way to earning nominations from the Golden Globes, Annie Awards, and Visual Effects Society Awards. The film leveraged a variety of open source tools including OpenUSD, Ptex, OpenVDB, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenTimelineIO and USD Notification Framework (UNF), a new open source framework licensed by Disney.
In addition, the developer of Intel’s Open Image Denoise, Attila T. Áfra, will receive a Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate) at this year’s Academy Scientific and Technical Awards on April 29. Open Image Denoise is an open source library that provides an elegant API and runs on diverse hardware, leading to broad industry adoption. Its core technology is provided by the widely adopted U-Net architecture that improves efficiency and preserves detail, raising the quality of CG imagery across the industry.
Congratulations to all of the artists and technicians behind these projects for their achievements this awards season! Stay up to date on the latest open source news and learn more about contributing to the Foundation’s various open source projects here: https://www.aswf.io/projects/.
