ROSA

November 11, 2011 10:57 AM

ROSA (vimeo) A sci-fi short animated film created by a new Spanish artist, Jesús Orellana. This was a year-long, solo project created without a budget.

Trailer: vimeo / youtube.

The full film is not yet available on Señor Orellana's youtube channel.

Background / Review:

"ROSA" is a sci-fi fantasy [short] film that takes place "in the near future, [after] humanity has disappeared, leaving behind a large megalopolis devoid of natural life. From the destruction awakes ROSA, a robot part of the KERNEL project, humankind's last attempt to restore the earth's ecosystem using recovered samples of long-extinct plant species. Wandering among the ruins of the lifeless city, ROSA will soon discover that she is not the only part of Kernel that has awakened."

Another Review

posted by zarq (8 comments total)

Looks great and is very impressive work for just one guy. Rest of it feels pretty cliché-ridden. It's very much possible to create environmentally-conscious animated sci-fi without wanton violence.

Now get off my lawn before I dry my hands with your hair.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:28 AM on November 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

I'm convinced. Now let's see what he can do with a budget and a scriptwriter.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:38 AM on November 11, 2011

Whenever I read 'SF', 'Comic book artist' and 'female protagonist', I know that there will be excessive closeups of a Platonic ideal of 'skin'-tight clad buttocks.

Without. Fail.


And yes, he's watched the Matrix a few too many times (including actually directly ripping the rooftop run / dive through window scene, which he reproduced three times). But, good artist, animation was skillfully done - here's hoping Hollywood doesn't chew him up.


(Still have a candle for 9, which shares a genealogy with this)
posted by Cheradine Zakalwe at 12:07 PM on November 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

Cleanup on aisle blood...
posted by obscurator at 12:50 PM on November 11, 2011

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Halfway through the fight I stopped caring, though, because the obvious questions of "why are these red-eye robots trying to beat the snot out of this green-eye robot" were being completely ignored. I watched it anyway because holy shit those were some pretty robots beating the snot out of each other. Ultimately there was some sort of vague reveal about the whys but a bit more foreshadowing of some kind would have kept me a lot more involved.

Total agreement on "this guy needs to hook up with someone who knows how to tangle narrative". Or at least to do some stuff with dialogue, it's a lot harder to get complex narrative across without it.



Cheradine Zakalwe > he's watched the Matrix a few too many times

Mmm, at this point I'm not sure. I've been doing a comic about a robot lady with superhuman reflexes (which I hope does not suffer from an excess of butt closeups) and I feel like I'm really doing a lot of the same kinds of things - trying to put the viewer/reader inside the head of someone who can do parkour at 50mph and pluck bullets out of the air pretty much requires slowing time way down. And if you're doing it in 3D then why not throw a camera move over your super-slow-mo?

(What would the POV of a knife missile look like? *grin*)
posted by egypturnash at 12:12 AM on November 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Animation 9/10
Story -2/10
posted by homodigitalis at 3:28 AM on November 12, 2011

(What would the POV of a knife missile look like? *grin*)


Knife missiles are under 1.0 value, given that they're expendable munitions, so the question is a bit meaningless. Reference.

Drones on the other hand...
posted by Cheradine Zakalwe at 4:13 AM on November 12, 2011

It was very pretty, but I thought the facial animation was a real weakness. All the "characters" seemed to have the exact same expression the entire time, with a few slight variations. I'm sure the software/hardware for facial capture is pretty expensive.

I kind of got bored during the fight as well. There wasn't any explanation about why they were fighting, and it was mostly just high-speed freneticness.
posted by delmoi at 8:36 PM on November 12, 2011