Still: Wing It! - Rik Schutte

Blender Studio’s 15th open source movie tells a madcap tale of mayhem and destruction as an engineer and a wannabee pilot seek to get their space shuttle off the ground. The shuttle that the feline engineer designs is truly Heath Robinson with all of its buttons and attachments, but the solution that the canine pilot discovers to wrestle back control when the vehicle is propelled prematurely towards space is truly inspired, relying on good old-fashioned wings and muscle power.
 
For director Rik Schutte, the relationship between the rocket designer and the pilot resembles that between Blender developers and artists, filmmakers and other users of the Blender software. In fact, despite the number of views on YouTube that are nearing a million, and Wing It!’s selection for Annecy Young Audience Competition, the film was a commission with that very specific purpose in mind.
 
“The initial idea came from Ton [Roosendaal, Blender founder] who gave us a challenge to think about a story that would be a metaphor for how Blender developers collaborate with Blender artists, who are two totally different creatures that need to communicate with each other,” Schutte elaborates. 
 
“So the story that I came up with was of the designer cat and the pilot dog who are both excited to be working on the rocket. But as the cat is very carefully trying to get this thing together, the dog cannot wait to get started and try things out. This is remarkably accurate as to how we work at the studio, where a tool might not be ready yet or the developer wants to continue working on it, but artists and users are desperate to start trying things out and downloading it. So the film is a metaphor about releasing something while it's not finished and having to come up with solutions on the fly to avoid it from crashing.”

In short, what Schutte and his colleagues in the Blender Studio do is to test the software by making the open source movies, and communicate their experiences directly to the developers. Assets of all Blender Studio productions are available for download (see studio.blender.org), allowing Blender subscribers to access the production/workflow files for their own use. Anybody can access Blender and start making their own film.

“That's basically what the goal of the Blender animation studio is, to really push the boundaries of animation and to improve the tools that we can provide.”

Schutte further describes Blender itself as “a 3D software package with a lot of different tools included that have been used for many different purposes, such as films, games, for architecture, for all kinds of things. What is great about Blender is that it is open source and therefore there is a very active community that supports it and also contributes to the Blender code.” 
 
At the same time, Wing It! is very funny and packed with action and stunts, and is made in riotous Tex Avery style (although the director also cites the influence of Russian/American animator Genndy Tartakovsky who made the Hotel Transylvania series).
 
The film is also a big advertisement for Blender itself, I suggest. “Yes, it shows off what you can do with the software,” Schutte confirms, before explaining how Wing It! fits into the overall Blender oeuvre.

“Every movie tries to challenge the software to create a unique style. So this one emulates the 2D cartoony, old school animation, but with modern 3D techniques. In that sense the main challenge was to work within a CGI environment, but to make it look like an out-of-time 2D animated short.”

Here you will find the complete overview of Dutch (co-)productions at Annecy and the screening schedule.