In another example of DIY cool, consider this: Pixar’s Inside Out 2 had a staggering $200 million budget, DreamWorks spent $78 million on The Wild Robot, and Aardman made the latest Wallace and Gromit film for about $40 million. But the Latvian animated film Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, was produced for just $5 million. Then they stunned Hollywood by winning both the Oscars and the Golden Globes. Passion and creativity, it seems, might be the most essential ingredients in any creative project.

Risa Haasbroek tells the story of this remarkable journey—one that began by ditching traditional storyboards and ended with an edit that had no deleted scenes. Every second of animation made it to the final cut, a cut made by a small team using free, open-source Blender software.

“I wanted a fairly small team, so I wouldn’t be stuck in endless meetings, and I could experiment and intuitively discover things.”

“People can forgive technical imperfections if they connect with the story. In jazz, if you make a mistake, you own it, and it becomes part of the appeal. In animation, those rough parts can be very appealing."

“There’s no easy way or shortcut. Failure is the best teacher.”

ARTICLE: “Flow”: The Latvian Animation Masterpiece That Defied Hollywood