“Tears of Steel” is a short film made in Amsterdam the Netherlands by the Blender Institute, well known for realizing the open source short animation movies “Big Buck Bunny” (2008) and “Sintel” (2010). As usual these films get financing by crowd-funding in online communities of 3D artists and animators.

For “Tears of Steel” the funding target was to explore a complete open source pipeline for producing a high quality visual effect film, with as theme “Science Fiction in Amsterdam”.

Producer Ton Roosendaal invited young Seattle talent Ian Hubert to come working in Amsterdam for 7 months to write and direct the film – assisted in Blender Institute’s studio by an international team of 3d and vfx artists, and with a Dutch film crew and Dutch actors.

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.

The film itself – as well as original footage and all the studio files – will be released as free and open content; the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Producer: Ton Roosendaal
Director & Writer: Ian Hubert
Starring: Derek de Lint, Sergio Hasselbaink, Rogier Schippers, Vanja Rukavina, Denise Rebergen, Jody Bhe. Chris Haley