For those who don’t know the tool: Blender is a free, open-source DCC for modelling, animation, rigging, rendering, compositing and editing. Blender Studio uses it for open movies, training, assets and pipeline tooling.
A feature project, not another short
Overgrown is a feature film project co-directed by Hjalti Hjálmarsson and Rik Schutte. The published material shows a post-human, robo-apocalyptic world reclaimed by nature, with raccoon and hedgehog character material in the project gallery. The project expands the studio’s familiar open movie model into feature animation. Production updates are planned for the Studio blog, with documentation and productivity tools intended for a feature-film pipeline. Glamour is nice. Repeatable folders are nicer.
The open playbook angle
“Feature playbook” is the marketing label. The concrete production promise is more useful: logs, production knowledge, project files, documentation and open source tools for larger animated productions. The goal is to give small teams a reference point instead of a heroic pile of mystery scripts, half-finished wiki pages and one technical director who must never take a holiday.
Funding before film
The project depends on subscriptions. The target is 7,000 subscribers by September 2026, with 5,182 subscribers listed at launch. Individual subscriptions start at €11.50 per month. The funding model puts the first 20% on subscriber support, covering visual development plus software and pipeline work. Early visual development would then be used to involve an external producer or distributor for the remaining 80%.
https://studio.blender.org/projects/overgrown/
https://studio.blender.org/blog/overgrown-announcement/
https://studio.blender.org/
