Chinese Version of Tears of Steel

Here’s a great story of the fun and success of the Open Movie’s Creative Commons Licences and the creative freedom that they allow. Because now there is also a chinese Version of Tears of Steel! They had their own actors, reshot the entire movie and combined it with the CG assets of Tears of Steel. It’s so cool to see them reenact all these scenes from our movie. And their Techhead is at least as crazy as ours! :)

Apparently it was a project from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation (http://english.ia.cas.cn) with the goal to build a team and explore the pipeline and workflow for future commercial projects. Further down Ethan Luo from the chinese Blender community shares some infos about this remarkable remake. Check it out!

Here’s a splitscreen version that reveals a bit more how they created this epic version of Tears of Steel!

It’s always great to see people using the open movie assets in their own projects, but seeing the love and detail that went into this one is simply awesome. Having worked on the original Tears of Steel myself I know what a pain greenscreen keying, rotoscoping and sometimes object tracking can be, but these guys did a great job, especially since they didn’t have access to a high end Sony F65 camera that produces supercrisp footage nor a luxurious giant well-lit greenscreen studio, so they probably had to deal with a lot more problems with keying and tracking.
So hats off to the creators of this “Tears of Steal”! I think it’s a great encouragement for everyone to actually use the open movie assets, use them for your own creations and learn from them!
:)

Here’s what Ethan writes:

The production Tears of Steel, China Style

“An 8 people team just remade the awesome movie TOS with 6 months and budget 25,000 EUR using Blender by the self learning from the source files in the DVD.

They found the support from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(CASIA) to rebuild the whole vfx workflow based on the TOS project. It is a very promising idea to set this object and also to build the team to get enough experience in CG industry. The 2 leaders of the team are two professors from CASIA, and 2 graduate students in assist with 4 people from BlenderCN community to work full time in this project.

The project kicked off from March of this year and most of the actors in this movie are the friends in the institute. They spend 3 days to finish the green shot and 1 day to shot the rest. The vfx work started from May and render farm fired up from August. And finally this movie released at 10th Sep to the world!

The team said they meet many problems during the whole production work and the neck of experience bring bigger trouble to them even they have the source files from project Mango. It is really tough to make the final release and please ignore those defects in some shots as you can not compare them to the real Mango team.

This project is not just a best practice for Blender but also a very good way of try and team-building. The remake of this film didn’t bring any profit for them but the half year of hard working bring them more than just a copy of TOS. They build the workflow based on Blender for their future and wondering if it is possible to reach to a higher level in business. The good news is that they already got some commercial project offers pending on their schedule after this movie’s release!

So as a limit of the tech there have few bugs and hope you just take them for fun. Never mind for that. :)

1. The bridge is made by wood at first but later it turned into stone. Well that because those two shots are created by two people and each of them believe their idea would be better. So the only way of the agreement is just let both of them to stay as their wishes.

2. The CG scene is europen style but the real shot for this movie is Chinese style which looks not so match. The reason for this issue is that they do not have enough budget to make a CG Chinese town and also not easy to find a european style town and bridge for real shot.

3. There still have many errors in the movie to match the lighting between real shot and CG vfx composition. The team has none experience of the green screen shot and they believe they can handle those things later. But seems the Node system is not a good system to help them to fix everything.”