Last minute timelapse: The Captain’s eyepatch

by - 2012/09/23 28 Comments Production

One of the very last minute changes to our was to add some extensions to the Captain’s eyepatch. This happened the 2 weeks after  the pre-premiere of Tears of Steel. The original eyepatch just felt a little bit naked. I mean, after all it’s just a disassembled webcam with red LED, taped to a metal strip. So we thought that maybe we could enhance that a bit.

Kjartan modeled a small but very effective extension, and Ian created a holographic text overlay, which goes really well with the other holographic elements in the movie. All in all there were 16 shots where you see the captain’s face, there was quite a bit to track and composite. Luckily lots of these shots are quite similar so a lot of the lighting and composite setups could be copied over.

Continue

Two pages in Parool – #1 Amsterdam newspaper

by - 2012/09/22 23 Comments Production

Last week I was interviewed by a very enthusiastic reporter from Parool (weekend edition with 300,000 readers). Today we’re on the front page and a double spread with a lot of backgrounds of the film and Blender.

In the text review I had to tone down the reporter’s enthusiasm a bit, but well – you know, press likes to make things a bit bigger! :) It’s a well written article, fun to read… and good to reach out to so many people here in the city.

-Ton-

Film Poster

by - 2012/09/21 34 Comments Production

Download here a half-res one (1350×2000 pixels – 5MB .png). The full size .svg with clean background render will be in the DVD box for our fans!

Tears of Steel

Quadsplit preview

by - 2012/09/19 20 Comments Production

This is a preview of a quadsplit version (storyboard, animatic, footage, final version) of the whole short film that will be available on the Tears of Steel DVD. Enjoy!

Tears of Steel – Hollywood premiere

by - 2012/09/19 11 Comments Production

ASIFA-Hollywood – the society of animation studios, including Pixar, Dreamworks, Weta, and so on – will organize and host a special screening event with three of our movie shorts – including the official premiere of Tears of Steel. We’re very proud! After the screening, the audience will participate in a Q&A session with Ian Hubert (via Skype).

Click on the image to the right to read the full invitation. Or check the official announcement.

Special thanks to Arno Kroner for helping to get this realized.

Next week friday, don’t miss this – if you’re in LA!

Tears of Steel costumes exhibit

by - 2012/09/12 8 Comments Artwork

The renowned Gallery of Contemporary Art W139 has invited fashion and costume designer Pablo Londono Sarria to exhibit his work for Tears of Steel. He will show his costumes, movie frame prints, and a collection of the props for the film.

The gallery is located very close to the “Oude Kerk” in Amsterdam – the location where our film takes place – in the middle of the Red Light district! Title of the exhibit is “Warriors at the Edge of Time”. The exhibit opens friday 14 September at 1600h.

http://w139.nl/en/article/20980/warriors-at-the-edge-of-time/




edit: updated with some pics from the actual exhibition!

Release Date: Sept 26th!

by - 2012/09/10 31 Comments Production, Random

So! We’re back in the studio and moving ahead- and we have a release date! Sept 26th! Just over two weeks from now. I dunno- maybe that seems like a good chunk of time to you guys, but to us it’s not much; we have to make a whole DVD before then! Ton just put up a previous blogpost listing all of the extra features we’re going to try to cram on there. Whole buncha goodies.

So mark your calendar! Tell your mom! Pay your internet bill! Look for leaked torrents! We’re finally gonna release this thing!

DVD box – contents

by - 2012/09/10 19 Comments Production

Today production of the DVD box has started. We aim at squeezing everything on a 4 DVD box – which gives max 24 GB of data (minus the PAL and NTSC sections). There’s still hope we can even go back to 16 GB data even – in that case we can also sell as extra service for everyone a 16 GB USB stick! That we only know end of next week probably.

Here’s the projected contents overview:

DVD VIDEO (NTSC and PAL discs)

  • Movie itself (subtitles in EN, DE, NL, FR, ES, RU, NO, IT)
  • Addition credits section for our loyal sponsors
  • Documentary

DVD ROM (2 x 8 GB + 2 x 4 GB optional)

  • Movie itself in HD, compressed in several qualities/sizes.
  • Movie in quad-split (or 6 split even): showing storyboards, animatic, original footage, cleaned footage, shots with preview renders, screenshots, …
  • Outtakes!
  • All used footage in JPEG2000 (HD)
  • Selection of original footage frames (4k OpenEXR and F65 RAW)
  • Press and print section: high quality renders (in 4k), backdrops, film poster
  • The cleaned studio database with .blend files, textures, etc.
  • Studio 1-week screencast (every artist was captured a full week)
  • Tutorials about the studio data – how to use files
  • How-to tutorials (how we rigged, modeled, textured, cleaned, tracked, lit, composited, graded)
  • Simple blends – files that load quick without external dependencies – for demo and easy sharing.
  • Final-edit .blend with sequencer edit of movie – using 1k .avi files (make your own cut)
  • Various cool stuff from the blog and what else we can find!

We’ll take 3 weeks to produce this. End of month the gold master will go to the printer!

Visit the Blender e-store to order the dvd box.

Popular use of Open Movies: tradeshows!

by - 2012/09/08 10 Comments Production, Random, Uncategorized

Hi everyone,

It was time for the annual IBC Conference in Amsterdam. It’s the largest Broadcasting/TV show outside of NAB Las Vegas. Always very cool to walk around and see some new development. I’ve been staring at an 8K tv showing Olympics footage… amazing.

Another fun thing to do at IBC is to spot our movies! This is a great example that illustrates the need for free and open content. It’s just a sample, in the 3 hours I was at the (only parts of the) tradeshow I saw many more. (The pics at QT and Fraunhofer show Sintel too, but not well visible).





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