Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 2, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The plot of the science-fiction film "Tears of Steel" clearly shows why you should never anger a robot woman. Thom makes precisely this mistake with the robot woman Celia in Amsterdam—with the result that forty years later, Earth is on the verge of complete destruction by a robot army. With the help of a team, Thom travels through time back to the scene where it all began and tries to save the world in this way.
Live-Action Shoot
After the successful predecessor projects "Elephant Dreams", "Big Buck Bunny" and "Sintel", which were purely animated films, "Tears of Steel" was created with live-action scenes and actors. Ian Hubert wrote and directed the screenplay, while a team of around a dozen open-source VFX specialists realised the project at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam in around seven months. The Blender film was financed by Dutch film funding, which explains the Amsterdam shooting location.
Technology
The film was shot with the Sony F65, and the project simultaneously made it possible to develop a complete open-source pipeline from camera tracking and rotoscoping through to colour grading. Alongside Blender, Ubuntu and Debian are said to have been used for rendering.
You can find a detailed making-of report in our current issue, DP 05/12.
Take the twelve minutes of the film’s running time and see the quality for yourself: We find the result of the fourth Blender project, in terms of effects as well as images and sound, very impressive for such a small team and the software used:
