OVERGROWN - Production Log #1

Blender Studio is making a feature film.

We announced the project in early July, but the team has already been working on OVERGROWN for several months. Here's a quick overview of what's happened so far.

Key Concept - Town Canal

Story

Our feature film is based on original story by Hjalti Hjálmarsson. The script is still in development, but its core remains intact: it's a personal story full of heart, rooted in an important parenting revelation. And it's set in a world that also reflects the theme. But let's not spoil it yet!

In June, the story reached a turning point. What began as a non-verbal production became a story with dialogue. We faced a choice: simplify the plot so it could be understood without words, or take an approach that creates more room for expressing complex ideas. We chose the latter. Now we're searching for the right words and voices for our characters.

Visual Development

Settling on a visual language is one of the hardest decisions in filmmaking. Once you commit, it's difficult to turn back if something suddenly stops feeling right.

We are now certain about the visual style, but at the start OVERGROWN had a different look. We began with a more nostalgic, traditional animation feel. It had its own charm and carried some classic animation vibe.

As rigging and shading moved forward, we started to doubt that direction. While the style looked stunning, it wasn't how we imagined the feature film by Blender Studio. After an extended exploration phase, we finally found the visual voice for OVERGROWN that truly sounds like us.

Building that bridge

During the exploration phase, the town canal set became our proof of concept for the art style. As you can imagine, it went through a long construction journey!

The scene is set in a typical small Dutch town. We used Dordrecht as a main reference. It is less known and quite smaller than our hometown Amsterdam, and also has a distinct canal area.

The first iteration of the canal bridge set in the old art style

 We essentially built the set twice. The first iteration was based on a blocking by Rik and Hjalti who had already started on animation previsualization. The proportions of the street were more realistic, as it was important for us to highlight that the world was not built by animals. The set design was heavily defined by the shading. Very early on, Simon assigned NPR shaders to the set blocking done by Rik for testing the art style. This was aided by Vivien who did several concept renditions in the initially picked flat style.

When we were rethinking our approach and searching for the new visual identity of OVERGROWN, we also wanted to push the shape language of the environment. As we moved away from the flat stylization, lighting and volume became important factors.

The set and all its assets, completely re-designed for more depth and appeal.

 Andy blocked out the bridge set again, using the previous version and animation as a starting point. Most of the landmarks stayed the same in terms of proportions: only the bridge was scaled in height as we were aiming to preserve the animation that had already been done.

What we ended up with was very much influenced by gouache paintings: high-contrast lighting, sketchy lines and stylized shading. We also added much more trees, plants and flowers to make the world an inviting place to be - and truly overgrown!

Canal set building progression File

That's it for now. Thanks for supporting OVERGROWN! In the next production log we will cover the results of this week, mainly in rigging and grooming.