Tears of Steel

Tears of Steel
Promotional poster
Directed by	Ian Hubert
Written by	Ian Hubert
Produced by	Ton Roosendaal
Starring	Derek de Lint Sergio Hasselbaink Rogier Schippers Vanja Rukavina Denise Rebergen Jody Bhe Chris Haley
Cinematography	Joris Kerbosch
Music by	Joram Letwory
Distributed by	Blender Foundation
Release date	September 26, 2012(2012-09-26)
Running time	12 minutes 14 seconds
Country	Netherlands
Language	English

Full movie

Tears of Steel(code-namedProject Mango) is ashortscience fiction filmby producerTon Roosendaaland director/writer Ian Hubert. The film is bothlive-actionandCGI;it was made using new enhancements to thevisual effectscapabilities ofBlender,afree and open-source3D computer graphics app.Set in a dystopian future, the short film features a group of warriors and scientists who gather at theOude KerkinAmsterdamin a desperate attempt to save the world from destructive robots.

Overview

Work began in early 2012 as theMango Open Movie Project.The film is a combination of live-action andcomputer generatedsets, props and special effects. It was officially released online for viewing and download on September 26, 2012.

Tears of Steelis the fifth project from theBlender Foundation,followingElephants Dream,Big Buck Bunny,Yo FrankieandSintel.It was created by theBlender Institute,a division of the foundation set up specifically to facilitate the creation ofopen-contentfilms and games.

The film was funded by the Blender Foundation, donations from the Blender community, pre-sales of the film'sDVD,theNetherlands Film Fundand Cinegrid Amsterdam. The film itself and any material made in the studio are released under theCreative Commons Attribution License.

Plot

The short begins with a view of a rocket lifting off. Thom (Vanja Rukavina) and Celia (Denise Rebergen) are standing on a bridge, arguing. Thom says both of them need to follow their passions; his is to be an astronaut and hers is the field of robotics. Celia, however, correctly concludes that Thom is scared of her robotic hand and breaks up with him.

Forty years later, killer robots created by Celia have taken over a desertedAmsterdam.Atop of a modified, futuristicOude Kerk,Barley (Sergio Hasselbaink) remotely activates the lights of a flying vehicle. Giant quadrupedal robots immediately attack the vehicle. With the robots distracted, Barley lowers an older Thom (Derek de Lint) into the Oude Kerk. There, a small team of scientists have preparedaugmented realityprojectors and are preparing to simulate the same bridge location shown earlier in the film, along with a robot in containment. They appear to be attempting to overwrite the memories of the trapped robot. The captain (Rogier Schippers) commands the scientists to start. Thom walks into the simulation, at which point his physical appearance transforms into the younger version of himself. One of the scientists then transforms the robot into Celia.

Thom relives the breakup moment in the simulation, in hopes of calming Celia and neutralizing the robots. The captain, using ateleprompter,orders Thom to respond to Celia's conclusion with "Celia, I love your robot hand", but Thom instead says "Listen, Celia, I was young, and a dick, but that's no reason to destroy the world." Celia grabs Thom by the face and seemingly prepares to kill him. The captain and his team panic, as this sentence has previously been tested and proven not to work. Scientists' attempts to abort the simulation, however, fails. Meanwhile, the killer robots break into Oude Kerk. Barley opens fire and other scientists join the fray using unconventional energy weapons.

Thom, nevertheless, is not harmed. As the memory overwrite process reaches completion, he ends the simulation by saying, "The world's changed, Celia. Maybe we can too." The trapped robot shows signs of calming down. Thom and "Celia" embrace as the other robots close in on them. Since they are not showing signs of aggression, it is implied that the experiment has ended successfully. The captain proclaims that it had lessons for them.

In a post credit scene, a breathless Barley is shown siting atop a heap of fallen robots, sipping mango juice.

Technical information

The live-action footage was filmed digitally using a Sony F65CineAltadigital motion picture camera. The finished film is available for viewing and download in4KandHDresolutions,Dolby5.1 audioand2.35:1aspect ratio format.

Filming was done in Amsterdam, theNetherlands.

Allvisual effects,computer-generatedcontent andcompositingwork was done within the Blender software package.

The Mango Open Movie Channel onYouTubecontains several videos explaining development and the techniques used by the team in making the film.There is also a behind-the-scenes documentary by user Sutrabla entitled "Throw it in the Canal."

On March 15, 2013, the computer-based film makers released the source material (about 5 times the length of the used materials) into the public using theCC-by licensewith the major restriction that images of the actors shall not be used for commercials. The material is available using theOpenEXRhalf floatfile encoding and makes up 4 TB of data for roughly 80,000 frames using a dimension of 4096 × 2160 pixels (see alsoUltra HD). It is the intention of the releasers to ease future developments for the film industry and other areas of image processing by making available this noticeably large amount of high definition professionally shot test data that has not been seen until now.

Improvements to Blender

As with the previousBlender Open Movie Projects,the Blender developers and community worked together to provide a movie studio style production work flow for the team. The results are a complete open source pipeline for visual effects work in Blender including but not limited tocamera tracking,rotoscoping,compositingandcolor grading.

These features are available starting with Blender v. 2.64.

Reception

The reviewer David Masters praised the film's visual effects while noting that the acting was wooden in places.

External links

• Official website
• Tears of SteelatIMDb
• Tears of Steelis available for free viewing and download at theInternet Archive
• Tears of Steel Complete Press Release
• Sony F65 CineAlta Camera
• Original live action footage on xiph.org