Tears of Steel is a crowd-funded short film created by Blender Institute in Amsterdam using Blender, an open source 3D content creation suite. It’s is pretty awesome.
The 12-minute film is chock-full of effects, and for the most part they’re pretty good. Some of the effects can look a little silly at points, but the whole film has a bit of an absurdist bent to it, so it kind of fits. Plot-wise, it revolves around a guy who has to make up with the robot girlfriend he pissed off years back.
Another movie from Blender Foundation: The Sad Tale of Sintel and Scales
I’ll leave it at that, but the concept is pretty novel, and executed well. So give it a watch, and be nice to your Roomba.
If you’re wondering exactly what goes into making something like Tears of Steel, its creators are more than happy to show you. It’s been released, along with all of its production files, under a Creative Commons license for other artists to remix and reuse.
Better still, a €34 DVD box with both NTSC and PAL versions of the film, all of the files used to create it, and nine hours of tutorials and walkthroughs is arriving on October 12th.