Just seen this today.
Waiting for more details, it seems a really challenging target.
Generally speaking I hope they’ll get this.
That kind of playground is tough and I hope that this will lead to develop new and more advanced way to do 3d with Blender.
Of course, Blender now has a tremendous feather in its cap by being the sole rendering technology that was used to produce an Oscar®-winning movie. The award was not technical: it was for the story content of the movie itself. And Blender did it all.
Without a doubt, Blender has by now matured enough that a feature-length open project is feasible, and can be achieved. It will just take longer . . .
Announcement of project OVERGROWN: https://studio.blender.org/blog/overgrown-announcement/
and the project link: https://studio.blender.org/projects/overgrown/
As tech demos, I enjoyed recent Studio short films. But the stories have been… underwhelming?
Well, they need to choose their battle. Recent shorts where smaller in scope than first open movies. I think their first goal is about visuals and blender studio didn’t involved writers or script doctors for good reasons.
And that’s fine because story isn’t the main point of interest for these shorts.
Obviously more story work could make them better, but it also add another layer of complexity as a story can be good but hard to produce and this asks for more back and forth…
Obviously it’s hard to foresee a feature film without someone working on the scripts and eventually storyboards.
When looking at these open movies we need to keep in mind that they have much more constraints than any other short film out there. Because they need to share their workflow, everything is build around blender, they also have a dedicated team and they can’t hire anyone just because they are talented. They need to be blender users first and comply with the open movie process…
In general you have more leverage when creating a short even if you have less ressources, for BF to make an award winning short given their constraints is even more challenging… But I think now blender studio team as grown big enough to be able to handle a feature film and they know what it takes and what they need to make it happen ! Hopefully they can manage to be great on the artistic side while complying to the open movie constraints !
I personally think that many of the Blender short films that I have seen were excellent. (Yes, others “not so much.”) Of course one of the goals was to demonstrate what successive versions of Blender could now do. But there was also good storytelling.
I’ll be quick to express the opinion that any movie has to begin and end with story. Otherwise, it’s just a technical tour-de-force. A feature-length story is considerably harder to make. If the story is carrying you along, then you can appreciate the technical achievements that are also being demonstrated.
Create a "dazzling script," and a cinema-grade rendering, using “Blender, today,” of that is now just a matter of time and effort. (And money.) Can the product do it? Yes.
As we know, an outside team recently used Blender to … win an Oscar®, based on story, not technology.
And, yeah, one of my all-time favorites is still: “Big Buck Bunny.” (Although I preferred the first render.) The whole script is bustin’ with story.
Well, it’s also a matter of skills, artist at blender studio are top grade expert in CG, but how much they are at story writing ? This isn’t that much of a problem if you keep the story simple, and we can always manage, as many artists are aspiring storytellers as well…
But it’s a bit different when writing is your main skills, that you’ve studied tons of story and you have technical tools to analyse and build a script.
Obviously not every story need the same amount of skills, BBB was a cartoony short and it’s most about gag and follow a simple narration. In something like Sintel there is dialogues, the story is more complex and emotional so it’s more challenging to write…
Anyway, I agree with you that there is always a story that works in all open movies.
In Sintel I think it’s the central point that makes the movie great, even though it’s a bit irregular technically and quality wise. That’s also probably when the movie ends we make a mental pause and reflect on what has been said and how this relate to us.
In recent movies I think it’s less the case, even though the story could be epic, it’s not enough to really move the audience, at least to me as a viewer. And I think this is because it’s a bit secondary. These movie are more about giving a visual experience, but they don’t have a strong message to carry to the audience and that’s fine, not all short have to …
Quoted for agreement.
If you’re trying to crowdfund $1M per year to fund a feature film, the script/story itself needs to be stellar. It can’t just be a passion project to have a vehicle by which to create a studio pipeline; audiences don’t care about pipelines.
Generally speaking I agree but it depends also who will be the producer that will put the 80% of the budget… if it’s someone that want to get back directly all the investiment with an economic gain, yes, the story will be super for a very wide range of people, something like the blockbuster did..otherwise, if the producer of the 80% is someone that is less interested just about money but has a more long-term plan with a marketing about the technology used for the production…well..at that point the selling of cinema seats is less important…
In any case, if they’ll have a great story it will be the best in all cases…so I hope they’ll have. 
I’m not sure it’s the right way to put it, some stories might not seems super interesting on paper but if they are well told they can turn out to be very enjoyable. In the other hand, you can have that super complex or original story that fail to move the audience.
For a long time I though originality and uniqueness is the basis of a good story, now I think it’s more about what the storyteller finds interesting in a situation, what they want to share with the audience.
While it’s possible to write a simple short without a lot of experience, managing 90mn of narration is a complete different beast. I’d be very surprised if they don’t hire a writer / script doctor … To me it’s not something problematic as it’s super obvious…
Totally agree on your points re: producer interest in profit.
My thought on audience interest, was to this:
To make it happen, Blender Studio needs more subscribers! We want to reach 7,000 subscribers by the beginning of September: this lucky number will cover the minimum base we need to get the feature pitch to the next stage, where we go to the film market and look for buyers and distributors
Crowd funding $1M just for “talking to buyers/dist” - buyers and distributors want to sell tickets and popcorn (or, streaming views), so that’s a profit win/loss factor that plays into what you need to deliver. Making an audience smile and tell their friends about this great film they saw (which, sells more tickets and popcorn. Unless we’re just talking about film film festival circuit, i guess. I don’t know much about the world of film festival economics.)
I think the concept art is very nice, btw. Character design is quite cute, and the environments are just lovely. Obviously, the people who want to create this have a passion for what they’re doing.
Funny thing here is that someone else, entirely out of our fan-zone, actually did select Blender to create a movie, and won the most-prestigious award for his content. So, it can be done. The question just seems to be whether the writers (and everyone else …) needed to execute such an ambitious project as a “feature” film are now available.
But, let us note that the latest “award-winner” came from outside of “our camp.”
It’s been done twice- Flow and Next Gen
Ah, it’s somewhat further along than I thought. Very exciting, I like the pitch. The focus on rigging practices is welcome. Hopefully that aligns with some development in that area. And the pipeline aspect should help other longform projects make it out the door.
This looks not bad 
The feature-film project is going to have to begin and end with a story concept and a feature-length script.
