Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Tears of Steel" is a 12-minute short film from 3 years ago and this was produced by the Dutch production company Blender Foundation. they made quite some waves with their animated short film work and here they step into a completely new genre: live action. Sadly, I must say it was not a successful transition. The inclusion of Derek de Lint, one of the Netherlands' most known actors, is a nice one, but it cannot make up for this being a really generic uninteresting science fiction movie. it may be true that this is not my favorite genre, but i still have seen many films from it and I feel there is nothing new in "Tears of Steel", nothing that hasn't been done before and, most of the time, at least as good or even better. The film defines itself a bit through its special effects, which is never a good thing. The reason may be that writer and director Ian Hubert is a longtime special effects artist. His work here really could have needed a better plot and story, including better character evaluation. Not recommended.

bob the moo Tears of Steel sounds like an interest concept. A young man and woman are on a bridge in Amsterdam; their relationship is not working out well perhaps because he has other dreams of being awesome in space whereas she believes he is just freaked out by her robot arm. We then jump forward to a near-future overrun by robots where, for some reason a man tries to recreate and resolve this original conflict with a large robot in the role of the girl. It appears early on that maybe there will be some interesting ideas in here and that ultimately the base of the film will be the relationship situation but it is not too long before you realize that this will not be the case.You see, this is a film credited to the Blender Institute – Blender being an open-source piece of 3D animation software. This film primarily exists as a way of showing off what is capable and as such it is impressive. Large robots, impressive city views, large action sequences – they are all done much better than you would expect with such a low budget. It is a real shame then that it is hard to really enjoy what they have made because outside of the effects it is surprisingly weak. I understand it is a short and it should be applauded for what it did with the resources, but I am always a bit surprised to find some in the shorts community so caught up in the need to praise that they seem to extend that goodwill to everything while at the same time would go after a blockbuster for being the same (money on the screen but nothing else). The plot doesn't go anywhere or tell you anything and the same time the dialogue is really poor – indeed so bad that at several points I assumed it must be a deliberate thing.Performances match the dialogue and are pretty weak throughout and all that remains are the effects. As I said, they are very impressive – not "for a short film" but just generally they are technically impressive. The problem is that they exist to show off Blender, not to make a film – if you really want to win over a community, it is better not just to show that you can animate complex things very effectively, but rather to show that Blender can serve as a tool for the low budget production of great shorts; this film shows the technology is there, but Tears of Steel offers nothing to suggest it helped make a good short film.

puppyzwolle As a movie it has great shortcomings. The story and acting are half descent for an amateur night but sure are not up to the standard of the production. The story is simple and well structured but misses a strong rhythm and even for the short 12 minutes it has a slow pace with many repeat shots and recurring camera angles even when it goes into 'full action mode'.The design and production get a A++. It looks totally awesome and the animation is superb. But Like Disney company had seemed to have forgotten after Walt died; Great skill in making the movie is just a tool to tell a story.It all is clearly a showcase for those awesome design 'skillz'. That is why they still get a 9 out of 10 and I would classify this as a must see event.Besides it's free under Creatieve Commons 3.0 Attribution license. How can you NOT like this?

William Barber I'm a big Blender user myself, have been into it for years and have always followed the movie projects from the Blender Foundation... Its previous one Sintel was an amazing piece of work as it not only demonstrated the capabilities of the software but was also an enjoyable and moving short film.Tears of Steel, instead of being a 100% 3D project instead became the first live action film by the Blender Foundation. Which made perfect sense as over the past year a lot of features have been added to the software to assist in that area... a new rendering engine to help with photo realism, camera tracking... color balancing etc etc... And, as an exercise to demonstrate those new features and what they are capable of the film did its job, the special effects are for the most part very impressive, aside from some poor 'green screen' moments they made a realistic environment to set the film.However, this is where my praise ends... as an actual short film, it falls flat on its face. The script is hammy, a little confusing and in some case, flat out dumb... 'Admit you don't like my robot hand!' ... really? It left me feeling quite let down after the hype and build up and my hope, is that next year they produce something that works as a tech demo AND a film at the same time. Not one or the other.