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The Spark

December 01, 2023

This is my original post that I wrote on Blender Artists on the "The Spark" thread. Unfortunately the censors on that platform decided to deprecate my views and edit out what I had to say. So I published my review on personal website where they don't have such unjust powers.

Envy!

The Spark is great in all the things that graphical artists value. It looks jaw-dropping. But it fails for me in the story-telling aspect of it. What is the story of The Spark? A character falls down a hole and finds there a clue. And because of how utterly bored he is, he decides to follow that clue until reaching a place where he finds grass. A thing that he was programmed to find. Yes, it is not as straight forward as him just walking there by himself and finding the grass. There are obstacles along the way, but non of them make any impact.

There is a great scene of tension where I thought finally there is something cool about this. When the battery goes low and he runs! I thought, holly cows, that is some cool development of the story. But then he just stands there and the sun charges him. This is deux ex machina. It’s a cheap trick. And it’s so uninteresting.

Tension is one of the essential things a story must have to make it interesting to the audience. How about there would be some pre-programmed rivalry between the robots? And that could be a great source of tension. Perhaps the first robot that finds the grass, would win in some way. And that would mean an entirely different set of dynamics. When the robot finds the plastic leaf in the beginning, he would not share it with others, but rather lie to them that he found nothing. Because this is for him a clue to the real grass. And sharing it would give others the advantage.

Then there is the whole other robot in the pipes with the clue. Say he found the grass but malfunctioned in some way on the way back with a sample. In the current version he just lays there with the geolocation device in his hand. But how about instead we show him with a real leaf. And we show signs of him trying to come back. Perhaps there are footprints on the ground, or something. The main robot is now having a challenge to solve. Not just go where the plot wants him to go.

There could be a scene of him following the footprints that lead nowhere. Perhaps a large chuck of them was washed off or something. So he needs to figure out a different plan. And I think a great shock value could come from him disassembling the other robot to reach the hard drive and try to download the data from him. Because simply touching him would not make a lot of sense. That would mean that the other robot has some sharing port that is active and serving data. But if we made it so robots do not want to help each other, that port would not be serving any data. And if the robot is fully dead, there would not be anything active inside of him either. So we need to take him apart to reach the hard drive. And it’s an image of murder in a way. Perhaps some hydraulic fluid of electrolyte could poor out of him as a kind of blood metaphor.

Then there is the huge door. That apparently somebody else is operating. It could be an interesting scene if that whoever doesn’t want to open the door. It could be a true obstacle and not just padding of runtime.

I’m mad. Yes. The movie looks good and that what people on Blender Artists value. That is why this movie is Featured. And my movie is not. Because I cared less about renders. I cared about story. I cared about characters.

Or maybe perhaps people are afraid of the message that my movie is telling and therefor giving it platform would feel somehow unrighteous. How dare I suggest the things that I suggest in my film! For you it’s so much simpler. It’s just a robot finding some grass. Nothing challenging about it thematically. At least not at first glance.

Envy!

On Blender-Artists
On Website of the Artist

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