Hacker Cinema
Tears of Steel
2012 · Film · short · 12 min
Directed by Ian Hubert
The film’s premise is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gathered at the “Oude Kerk” in Amsterdam to stage a crucial event from the past, in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots.
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6 comments on Hacker News
This isn't unique to AI. Visual effects have been achievable on my desktop computer for as long as I can remember (I'm in my mid twenties). Industry standard compositing tools such as Nuke, Autodesk, Fusion, have had free educational/non-commercial versions forever, and you can replace almost all of those with Blender. Watch Tears of Steel, a short film done almost entirely in FOSS.
Technology aside, I believe that the monopoly on talent, as in the hiring of talent is symptomatic of a monopoly on distribution, which means the devaluing of talent over reach is actually worse for the independent filmmaker.
"Tears of Steel" was the fourth Blender Open Movie project. The first one was 2006's "Elephants Dream", then "Big Buck Bunny" and "Sintel".
From the more recent ones I highly recommend "Sprite Fright".
Im not a 3d artist, but I still find Ian Hubert's blender tutorials[1] very cool to watch.
He comes off as an artist who immensely enjoys their craft. I have also really enjoyed his Dynamo Dream series [2] which are a labor of love for him. He's only released like 3 episodes over several years, but hey labor of love.
Ian was also chosen as the director of Tears of Steel (2012) which is one of the Blender Open Movies [3] the foundation produces. You might not recognize that film, but many of you have heard of at least one Blender Open Movie, Big Buck Bunny! A big nod (IMO) from the Blender foundation that he represents the spirit of the project and community, as well as has the skills to oversee a project meant to demonstrate Blender's capabilities.
These Open Movies are projects that HN can likely appreciate, as they are created to showcase and help push capabilities of the open source Blender software, are licensed under Creative Commons, and their assets are provided to the community for free.
(This comment is a love letter to Ian Hubert)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@IanHubert2
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A
[3] https://studio.blender.org/films/
Thank to that, I've just learned about open movies and am very excited. I wonder how far open movies can get us in the indie scene, can it make impact similar to open software. I watched Tears of Steel and thought to myself: "My, some parts of this are so cheesy!" and then immedeately thought "But if you don't like it - you may fork the project and make it better!".
One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" side of open source software.
That doesn't mean Blender users need to do that to be productive, but it definitely gives actual users a stronger voice. I find free software generally doesn't work as well when there's a hard split between the developers and the users, unless those developers are incredibly empathetic, clever, and well funded. (Or just fully aware of the problem they're solving, but it's hard to find a large sample of people that can write a really good vector graphic editor, have a clue about UI design, and are also keenly aware of the problems people deal with when they're drawing a graphic novel).
You can see that process working well with Blender's open movie projects (https://www.blender.org/about/projects/). I haven't paid attention to them recently, but in the past they have been structured around building some new feature in Blender, such as improving the video editor and motion tracking experience (Tears of Steel), or rendering and sculpting (Sintel).
Big Buck Bunny is from a number of films by the Blender Foundation. They also made the live-action movie Tears of Steel, which can be downloaded uncompressed: http://media.xiph.org/tearsofsteel/