“The Goat, The Boy and The Sun” by Martin White

Posted on by

goat_boy_sun.jpgMartin White the nominee of the 2005 Suzanne Award for the Best Animation Artwork has completed his 20min film entitled: The Goat, The Boy And The Sun.

Martin has been inspired to make 3d animated films since seeing the animated film Tron as very small child. Today with tools available pretty cheap for the masses, Mr. White finally had the chance to make something out of his life.

In 1999, a blinding light illuminated White’s face, as he for the first time heard the classical piece by Prokofiev: “Scythian Suite” conducted by Kurt Masur on a BBC. That taken with his love for Disney’s Fantasia, inspired him to take the entirety of Mr. Prokofiev’s music piece and create an animated short.

After seeing the stunning images created by the Blender and Yafray community, he decided to take the open source route. And not long ago after many years of hard work he presented his 3rd animated film at Blender Artists Forums for everyone to see!

White writes a bit in the Blender Artists Forums thread:

It was turned down by about fifty film and animation festivals around the world and has still never had a public screening. Perhaps it’s not difficult to see why – the character animation is sloppy in places and it’s a big commitment to program a film that’s nearly twenty minutes long. It also has a rather bleak ending, which people I’ve shown it to tend to get rather taken aback by.

I’m still fond of it though and there are a few bits I’m very proud of, particularly the sunset.

Nearly everything is rendered “in-camera” in Yafray, except the stars and the mist, which were rendered separately in Blender and composited over the top. There’s some of the Blender sequences ‘glow’ effect on the early daytime shots, too. Oh, and there’s some laboriously hand-painted motion blur at 00:07:20!

A contact at the BBC here in the UK advised me to put sound effects on it if I want to sell it to television, so I’m going to be making a start on that soon – it really does make all the difference.

So please support Martin White in this great achievement!
[ev type="google" data="-5276289575445969377"][/ev]

Visit the offical website, www.goatboysun.com and Martin White’s personal website, martylog.com!

(Thanks to Calvin for writing a great deal of this article)

Be Sociable, Share!

    Twitter



    Please support us

    • greboide

      ive watched it, its a nice realization, 20 minutes isnt an easy task, i just miss some dialogues, could make the whole thing more animated, also there are long sequences that turn into nothing, but overall, and how was made by one person i would give 5 stars.

    • http://mathiaspedersen.com MathiasPedersen

      This is some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in a Blender made film to this date! The camera angles feel very cinematic.

      Great!
      //Mathias

    • http://www.blenderprojects.com/calvin Calvin

      YEAH! Finally! :D

    • http://www.cuby.co.nr Cuby

      I really enjoyed watching this short film! It’s absolutely excellent! Congratulations Martin White!

      I look foward to seeing some more work by you maybe.

    • http://www.excellentWhale.com Joeri

      I agree with Mathias, the compositions are the best part of the movie.
      The weakest part I think is the connection between the music and the movie, I don’t really feel it.
      But I like the story, but it’s told a little to slow and takes maybe a bit to long for 2007?
      That’s the hard part when starting out with the music. I’m sure it would be aired when edited shorter with a new written movie soundtrack,… but that is not what this project is about I guess.

    • bimbo

      Congratulations to Martin White!

      And all teams behind Blender.

      I hope somebody make a documentation about Blender.
      Reminiscing the years of just how fast and strong Blender has become.

      A toast to all of us!

    • bimbo

      *er* documentary film is what i mean. ;)

    • myselfhimself

      hi
      to sell it better
      you could an “off voice” telling the story (ex : the first character narrating “how it all happened”).
      that’s the kind of movie I’d see on Arte or France 5 ; TV Channels in France, seen how special it is.

    • jmh1

      I really liked, although there could have been a scene of the boy showing the goat how to make a fire to justify the ending. But for the most part I really enjoyed it. Well done

    • Cortot

      This is a very impressive film. I forgot time. It is immersive. I feel a connection between pictures and sound. Timing and lighting are very good. Be carefull with marketing people. Maybe this movie could be even slower – with some fades to black.

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Very good movie. Making a film alone is very hard, and starting from the music seems even harder.

      Congratulations Mr White!

    • http://lokidg.blogspot.com Tiago

      Great Job !!! Nice style, Nice history.

    • http://thinningpictures.googlepages.com LoMac

      I thoroughly enjoyed that. Fantastic job!

    • http://www.rgbk.org Bmud

      Beautiful and epic. I consider 20 minutes sort of long for my own annual back yard film festival, and I’m sure that is the reason that it has been turned down. I’d love to squeeze it in somehow. Congratulations on completing it!

      1. Are you going to make further improvements?
      2. Will it be soon released in hi-res, dvd, or any other formats nicer than youtube?

    • http://www.plumiferos.com malefico

      Good work. I specially liked the chosen aesthethic of the film, probably a little biased due to the fact it was rendered in Yafray (almost no textures, plain colours, global lighting, etc).

      I feel there are some issues with the story, and a few ones with animation, but overall a great work. Congratulations.

    • tom

      yeah, we could make an documentation film about blender in blender… ;-)

      fantastic job martin! i just finished a 2 minute animation and i can´t even imagine the effort you had with that movie! i watched the whole film, and yeah!! very cute goat… i really like the story!

      congratulation again!!!

    • http://www.martylog.com Martin White

      Wow, thanks for posting my film on Blendernation. An honour! :-) Thanks for the feedback – I’m going to use the advice going forward into new projects rather than going back and fixing this film. It was a film I had to get out of my system and I’m pretty much happy with it as it is.

      Thanks to everyone who took the time to watch it!

    • Arite

      I thought that was superb – congratulations on completing it, I have been look forward to seeing the completed film for ages now.

      I didn’t think the ending was at all bleak – a great job with the animation and the story.

      Well done!!

    • http://www.alumnos.utfsm.cl/~pablo.barria/ differentSmoke

      well, I can’t wait to have the 20 mins(tonight, prolly) to watch it, but a quick criticism:

      it doesn’t LOOK great, yet it FEELS great. As they said, very cinematic. Still, it lacks in textues and BACKGROUNDS. (this from a quick scan). It kinda looks like the demo reels of pixar when they show pre-rendered animations(that was a compliment!!). I think a good work of texturing the film, or at least of making a bit more complex backgrounds, would really, really, really add to it.

      that.

    • http://www.paraisoenterprises.com ByronK

      This was monumental! How far you have come from your inspiration of TRON,(which also was my first inpiration.) I liked the expressiveness of the characters, being simple in appearance with just what was needed to convey emotion. I really was moved by the story and the characters. I can’t imagine the amount of planning alone, the project must have taken. With the detail of camera angles and action, the story board alone must have taken ages. I hope sometime you will share your work flow for this project.
      Thank you Martin White, for a wonderful and inspirational experience.
      Byron

    • cmw

      Amazing! The camera work really brings this home.

    • shirish

      Hi Martin,
      The same thing I wrote in an e-mail to you just in case you might have missed. It would be cool if you give a hyper-link so people can download the flash or .ogg or whatever format movie that you made. Sorry I’m not familiar with blender as a tool but have seen some of the movies made & they are cool.

    • Jon

      Wow. Brilliant. Certainly not visually perfect, but the story and drama really makes it. I had to see what happened in the end. And don’t change the end. It was great and fitted with the ‘mythical’ nature of the story. Far more powerful than a cheesey hollywood happy ending.

      For a simple visual style that works really well you may want to take influence from…

      http://www.pocoyo.com/

      (Go to the cinema section)

      Adding sound effects will certainly take it to another level.

      The story would be worth remaking in a few years time when you skills have got even better and you may have a team to work worth.

      If you need a graphic designer for title design and branding on future projets I would love to help.

    • http://yorik.orgfree.com Yorik

      Fantastic!!! There is a strong relationship between the simplicity of the visual and audio aspects and the story… Marvelous work!!!

    • http://www.peerlessproductions.com Colin Levy (effstops)

      Incredible achievement, Martin! Very cinematic, great story, nice integration with the music. Great job!

      –Colin

    • robert

      brilliant indeed, this is a personal thing but i found it far more enjoyable than elephants dream

    • Antknight

      Bravo!

    • pictorali

      Great work! The music and story were excellent. Interestingly, I thought, at least toward the beginning, the animation had a pleasant fluidity to it. I’m not sure if the lack of textures was a conscious design choice, but it didn’t detract from the film at all in my opinion- it’s one of many options in conveying a story.

    • http://www.cyberspiesclub.com durand

      Wow, that was so well directed! It was nearly perfect, i thought the lighting wasn’t as good (strange amount of brightness at night) but apart from that, 10 out of 10!

    • Operandi

      Martin. Wow! You did that twenty minute piece all by yourself. Amazing!

      Anyone: Is there a website that lists where these animation shorts made in blender can be found on the web? Recently, I have seen two other really good animations presented on this site. Both were done by individuals and were between three and six minutes. The first was about a fairy in a beautiful forest area. The other was about a boy who got stuck in the woods during a lightning storm.

      If there isn’t a website that lists the released animations from blender, there should be. Elephant’s Dream was a work of art, but, I think people want to be able to see even more to get a sense of how broadly used the program is.

    • http://www.mathiaspedersen.com MathiasPedersen

      @Operandi: Remember that it’s not necessarily every artist who wants to go with an open-source movie concept like Elephants Dream. To my knowledge Elephants Dream is the only large project I’ve seen give away source files (some other individual film projects like this one might have done something similar, but it’s still very rarely seen). I don’t think there are enough open-movie projects to justify any list website yet. There might be in the future, if artists want to release their artwork under this license.

      Don’t expect all artists to be keen on making .blend files available to the public. It’s certainly their own choice, and I fully understand if they are reluctant to, cause a lot of personal effort goes into making these movies.

      //Mathias

    • rogper

      I there! Congratulations for the acomplishment!
      I know exactely wath you’ve experienced during the making because I’m experience it now with Orion Tear, the diference is that O.T, is only 10 minutes movie :) but still very hard to do alone :|
      Good Luck with the sound ^_~

    • Operandi

      @MathiasPedersen

      I wasn’t seeking the source .blend files, just the final rendered .avi’s.

    • http://www.mathiaspedersen.com MathiasPedersen

      @Operandi: Ah, I see. My bad. Reading too much between the lines I guess. :)

      As far as I’ve seen Martin White only uploaded this Google Video link. You’re right a better quality format would be nice.

      //Mathias

    • axar

      that was amazing.

      but

      dude…. did the goat die???

      cause it looked like he lit himself on fire in the end :(

    • http://opticallyminded.com d@rek

      Wow! Amazing work! I’ve been waiting for this for a while, and it was worth it!

      The ending was perfect…except…the goat…

    • http://www.duncanweller.com Duncan Weller

      Absolutely wonderful! The story, the images, and the music all work well together, although at first I had some trouble with the music relating to the opening sequences, it really works in the end. I would rely on minimal sound effects, more in the beginning, and less towards the end. And the ending, where the goat sacrifices himself, is a far better and more meaningful ending than a typical happy ending. Congrats!

    • tyy

      this isnt made in blender he has used 3ds max hes just trying to cover his piracy tracks by saying he made it in blender

    • http://www,seanjmacisaac.com SeanJM

      It was no small task, But the animation needs work. I recommend you read the animators survival kit. Your animation is lacking arcs and characters should never be static. The animation *pops* here and there.

      On the upside! Your renders look good, materials are good, chamera angles are also good.

    • http://kkrawal7.googlepages.com kkrawal

      Got a new courage to go ahead with Blender.

    • http://inkweaver-review.blogspot.com NathanKP

      Wow!

      This is a powerful and complicated movie. Good work!

      NathanKP – Inkweaver Review