This week, as HDR color grading is being wrapped up and final render fixes are being committed, work continues on the film poster and other PR related things!
A painterly space adventure set in a universe before the beginning of our time.
Story & concept
Singularity takes place in a distant age of the universe, when the stars and galaxies were young. When an ominous cosmic event swallows a small space critter's home, he must find refuge among a group of others, watched over by a mysterious celestial being.
Directed by Andy Goralczyk, this short film was created using the latest, in-development version of Blender. While working on Singularity, the Blender Studio team expanded the Brushstroke Tools library by adding new painterly assets, and explored the procedural power of Geometry Nodes for animating crowd behaviour.
Look development
Art Director Vivien Lulkowski based the artistic style of Singularity on watercolour illustrations. The strong traditional media influence seen in the hand-crafted textures and brush strokes is intertwined with generative effects and simulations. The creatures of this universe and their ecosystem feel vibrant and organic, in stark contrast to the threatening angular shape of the Black Hole.
Character design
Mysterious and colourful creatures of the deep sea served as the main source of inspiration behind the energy-driven space critters. Critter, our lovable protagonist – part tardigrade, part axolotl, part gummy bear – is a small and vulnerable creature, barely able to outrun the Black Hole. Looming in the background is the enormous jellyfish, The One, a mix of octopus, plants and various other invertebrates. Its energy gives the creatures a chance to break free, illustrating how life thrives with the most unlikely alliances.
Animation
We wanted Singularity to feel painterly and hand-crafted in every aspect. To communicate this through motion, fluid environments and effects animation on 1s was seamlessly mixed with more stylized character movements on 2s.
Sound & music
Aiming to create a film that speaks to everyone, regardless of background or language, we chose a no-spoken-dialogue approach. This decision created plenty of space for sound effects and the score. Composer Dario Vero joined us to craft an impactful score, and sound designer Sander Houtman tied everything together in a theatrical sound mix that feels massive, intricate and immersive.
Open content, made with Blender
Besides telling a compelling story, the goal of this project was to advance Blender’s capabilities when working with stylized rendering, animated effects and high-quality images. This is Blender Studio’s first 4K HDR film, so make sure to enjoy it on the largest screen you can find!
We have documented the production process with in-depth articles, breakdowns and weekly production log videos. Additionally, all the production assets, frames and high-quality encodes are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Credits & people
- Andy Goralczyk – Director
- Vivien Lulkowski – Art Director
- Fiona Cohen - Producer
- Francesco Siddi - Executive Producer
- Dario Vero - Music
- Sander Houtman - Sound Design
- Beau Gerbrands - Visual Development
- Demeter Dzadik - Character Rigging
- Hjalti Hjálmarsson - Layout and Animation
- Julien Kaspar - Character Modeling
- Pablo Fournier - Animation
- Rik Schutte - Animation
- Sebastian Parborg - IT and infrastructure
- Simon Thommes - Shading and FX
And the entire Blender development and contributors team.
About
Blender Studio
Blender Studio is a team of artists and developers working within the Blender project, focused on creating cutting-edge content, sharing production knowledge, testing and contributing improvements to the latest in-development version of Blender. This process is called content-driven development, and has been a core part of the Blender projects since 2006.
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Production Logs
Check out the latest updates on Singularity. See all production logs
Is this the last one?
March 2nd, 2026
Andy Goralczyk
Director
While working on a handful of render glitch fixes on the film, I picked up where I last left of on the movie's various poster ideas.
Into the grade wide open
Feb. 23rd, 2026
The final rendering is complete! Andy is the last person remaining on Team Singularity to complete the color grading, render error fixing and export.
Andy Goralczyk
Director
I want to keep the final version of the film a surprise, so unless more people are begging to see it, I'm gonna refrain from uploading it here :) This week I've done the first pass of color grading on the film in the VSE. Sergey helped a lot ironing out the workflow for proxies and HDR, and by the end of the week I had a pretty responsive set-up! I did an entire pass of the film, ironing out the differences between shots and conforming everything to look great in SDR and HDR.
100% rendered! (kinda)
Feb. 16th, 2026
This week we prepped the last shots for the farm! The last missing puzzle pieces to render the ending (Spoilers!) were the underwater environment and evolved Critter. Now we move onwards to final compositing and colour grading.
Simon Thommes
Technical Artist
This week I actually definitively wrapped up my work on Singularity, leaving only Andy to put on the finishing touches. My last tasks were all about the final shot of the film to add that last bit of visual fidelity.
Andy Goralczyk
Director
This week I've been re-working the lighting of the last shots in 050_contact and sent everything to the render farm. In the meantime I've created a few compositing effects to add more drama and consistency to the shots.
But wait, there's more! See all production logs