A Future Funded Elsewhere

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This post about the UK’s funding for creative technologies got a little moany – dangerously close to breaking my rule about not being negative on the Internets. But I did try to end it on an upbeat note! I’m also aware that there are many bigger and more pressing issues going on in the world right now but I had to get it off my chest.

A Future Funded Elsewhere

At the start of the year I wrote a little despondently about ‘the state of things‘ in the UK.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the UK right now is a deep and pervasive incuriosity among those who control the money in these sectors. The lack of vision is staggering. Take grants, for instance: I recently looked into an AI Arts funding opportunity for a project I’m working on, only to discover it required a 50-page form for a maximum of £15,000. I bailed. The effort-to-outcome ratio wasn’t worth it.

What’s maddening is the sheer potential of this moment. Things are moving at breakneck speed—entirely new technologies, mediums, genres, and shared experiences are emerging before our eyes. Yet, there’s little to no opportunity to execute or take advantage of any of it, at least not in the UK.

Which is why Flow winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature last night is such a big deal. A film made entirely in Blender—the free and open-source 3D software—on a budget of just €3.5 million.

In 2022, my friend Cade Diehm wrote an important research note over at New Design Congress on open-source creative tools: The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point. He wrote the following about Blender:

Blender – an open-source 3D modeling and rendering tool – has a similar historical trajectory to Godot’s. Founded as an open-source project in 2002, Blender’s 20 year history is the story of committed community development and strategic investment from both direct partnerships and distributed funding. Following a major UX overhaul in the 2010s, Blender has enjoyed a stratospheric rise to become an industry standard despite hundreds of millions invested annually in competing commercial alternatives. Blender’s powerful modeling and rendering tools and its best-in-class user experience make it incredibly versatile, yet easy to learn and master. Its status as an open-source and extensible project has fostered a blossoming plug-in ecosystem and – more importantly – allows professional teams from a variety of industries to customise and integrate Blender safely into their workflows.

And here we are in 2025: a movie made in Blender just won an Oscar. If you’re interested in how Flow was made, the animation director did a deep dive at Blender Conference last year:

There’s also a great write-up over at The Animation Obsessive today on why Flow’s win matters—not just technically, but because the film exists at all:

Hollywood loves Flow. It’s been praised by Guillermo del Toro; Barry Jenkins called it a “masterpiece.” Yet it couldn’t have been done in Hollywood — it’s too odd for the people who call the shots. This is a movie with no stated story, about animals that don’t talk, filmed in long, immersive takes that can last for minutes. Plus, it’s indifferent to the visual fidelity race: certain execs might dismiss it as previz.

Flow succeeded anyway. It earned $20 million — far more than it cost — and swept awards season. This comes as Hollywood animation is reeling from executive mismanagement: cutbacks, canceled movies, poor treatment of artists and a chronic aversion to risk. Today, only a few animated films are happening there at all.

“Animation is performing better than ever, but Hollywood studios are asleep at the wheel,” Cartoon Brew argued last month. “Their theatrical schedules are barren at a time when they should be brimming.”

Flow got made through the European co-production model, pulling together funds from multiple small regional sources, which is how it scraped together its 3.5 million budget. Try replicating this under Hollywood’s system of blockbuster budgets, huge marketing overheads, and creative committees—it’d either balloon in cost or never get past the pitch stage.

Flow is basically, everything that large, risk-averse studios hate. And yet, here it is: finished, lauded, Oscar-winning, proving that open-source software can now compete at the highest levels.

Flow and Blender’s success proves that open-source tools can blow past their “amateur” reputation and become serious contenders—challenging incumbents like Autodesk or Adobe etc. As Cade argues, if Blender can do it, so can the game engine Godot. A while ago, just like Blender, Godot was a niche open-source project that only indie devs used. But it has a real chance of becoming the Blender of game development.

But here’s where I have to sigh loudly about how the UK is nowhere near ready to seize this moment. While Europe invests in riskier auteur works through robust co-production schemes, the UK dishes out micro-grants with monstrous application processes that sap your will to live. Tiny pots of money, convoluted processes, and a total failure to see that investing in creative tech now means shaping the future, rather than forever chasing it.

Meanwhile, the European model—drawing funding from multiple sources in countries like France, Belgium, and Latvia—allowed Flow to sidestep Hollywood’s bureaucracy. Director Gints Zilbalodis and his team had the freedom to embrace a dreamlike vision and use Blender, a tool with no licensing fees and a massive user community. That’s the power of open-source. If a director in his early 30s can do this with a ragtag network of co-producers, imagine what else is possible.

This success story should be a wake-up call for UK. You’d think Flow winning an Oscar on open-source software would spark new grants, multi-year funding schemes, and proper support for the creative arts. But here we are, still stuck with forms longer than screenplays, max awards that barely cover a couple of months cashflow for a small team, and a mindset int he media that sees this kind of creative work as niche or frivolous.

Blender and Godot open up incredible creative opportunities for so many people, the UK is doing absolutely nothing to capitalise on them. The BFI Short Form Animation Fund caps at £120,000—nowhere near enough to produce a feature. Independent animators and video game creators compete for broader arts grants, with no recognition that animation and games require different support structures. The UK Games Fund offers up to £30,000, but only for prototypes. That’s fine for a tiny experimental project, but useless for a full game. CreativeXR, meanwhile, focuses on “immersive storytelling” but it’s mostly tied to big institutions, sidelining solo developers and small teams. I know £500,000 for VR projects sounds substantial, its distribution across 10–15 teams results in grants too small to offset the UK’s rising software and motion-capture costs. And don’t get me started on the recent AI fund’s requirements.

Compare this to Europe: France’s CNC funds animation directly, and Screen Ireland provides structured, multi-year investment in animated films. That’s why Flow was possible—because the European model backs creative risk.

In contrast, UK funding remains a bureaucratic nightmare. Forms longer than screenplays. Grants that barely sustain a few months of work. Endless hoops to jump through, insane reporting requirements. There is just no joined-up thinking across the creative technologies sector.

And it’s infuriating, because the talent is here. There’s ideas here too and the tools are nearly free. But the people holding the purse strings remain stuck in a mindset that sees work in these areas as experimental, rather than recognising that animation and games are the future of cultural production.

If you’re an animator or game dev in the UK, you’re probably already looking at co-productions with Irish or mainland European studios. Because that’s where the money, curiosity, and boldness are.

But here’s the thing: this shift is already happening, with or without institutional support.

More students are arriving at university with hands-on experience in Blender, Unity, Unreal, or Godot—not because they took formal courses, but because they grew up in a digital world where these tools are second nature. Gen Z instinctively understands video editing, 3D modelling, and game engines, just as early-2000s students arrived fluent in Word, Photoshop, and basic web design. With Fortnite’s Unreal Editor, Roblox Studio, and thousands of Blender tutorials on YouTube, generations are learning these tools long before stepping into a classroom. Open-source and game engines aren’t the future—they’re the present already.

The real question is whether the UK will embrace this shift or keep throwing money at STEM initiatives while ignoring the creative industries that actually shape culture. Maybe we’ll just spend it all on a war. either way the outlook is grim.

Flow’s win should be a reminder to everyone that open-source tools are levelling the playing field. The cost of production continues to fall. AI and virtual production will also play a major factor in all this too. I think anyone who is investing money, time and resources into this area today will get to shape the next decade of animation and video games.

It’s time for UK funders to wake up. Because the future isn’t waiting.

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On The Blog:

Didn’t post much on the blog this week as I’ve been busy elsewhere. But I cleaned up some misspelt tags and merged some other tags that were the same word but with a plural. Just gardening, you know how it is.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Went to a friends Exhibition Launch
• Went to a friends book lunch
• Reading lots and lots of technical documentation.
  • It seems like the older I get, the more things I want to do require code
• PROJECT ENTRY – Catch ups, spreadsheeting and reporting with the funder
• Spent some time messing with Deep Research. Though I feel like I need to save/horde my precious credits its insanely good. I think my first/current use case is having it produce tailored tutorials on ‘I have an idea, write me an introduction / tutorial about how to do something I want to get done, but have no idea how to do/where to start’

Terminal Access

Hot on the heals of Ben Bratton’s talk on AI, earlier this week K Allado-McDowell gave a talk about ‘Neural Media’ at Long Now Foundation.

Reading

I finished reading The Bell and the Blackbird by the poet David Whyte.
I also read Leontus: Lord Solar by Rob Young which was … ‘ok’ but its a Warhammer book very much designed to sell a model. It ‘humanised’ the protagonist too much and I think its inappropriate to the grimdark setting.

I’ve started re-reading Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer – as if I don’t already have 10 other books on the go FML.

Colin Self – respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, aka r∞L4nGc

Colin’s new album is out. I posted the first single from it last year. Across the whole album there’s 2 step, 80s horror vibes and transcendent ballads. The whole album windsdown towards the album closer ∞ . Which is a 10min journey across layered vocal harmonies and crushing club music. Quite unlike anything you have heard before, or are even prepared for.

<3 Colin. Hope I get to see this live.

Remember Kids:

Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict-courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.

The Warrior Ethos by Steven Pressfield