Reviewed by Aaron Haynes

Now THIS is the kind of newbie effort I like to see. While not exactly breathtaking in scenery, construction, animation, or the various complex shots it tries for, it's actually kind of engrossing in a way and represents at least a well-realized idea for a movie if not a well-executed one. Raider demonstrates an eye for the kind of shots he wants and tries a bunch of different cinematic techniques -- though crude and often too long, too overused, or too poorly animated, A Life of a Sheep comes across as one of the better early attempts at making something worthwhile with the program. In fact, the more I think back to MY first attempt at creating a movie with a full plot, the more my respect for this grows.

The plot in question is extremely simple: The adventure of a sheep who decides to jump the fence and go exploring. There's only one line of dialogue in the film, and that's Apfigur going "BAAA-AAAAA." The animation and music overlaying the movie does a fairly good job of telling the story, and occurrences where we wonder just what the hell we're supposed to be seeing are kept to a surprising minimum. The path of the film is shown through various closeups, POV shots (complete with an inventive if somewhat poorly implemented blinking device), overhead angles with the sheep represented as single spheres, low-framerate slow motion, and fade effects. Unfortunately, most of these are pretty crappily done or utilized poorly; at one point we see a sheep jumping over a fence done with the single-frame fade technique seen most recently in Stranger 4. This held my interest until about the fourth fading scene, and by the seventh I was leaning back and yawning (HAH!). Occasionally camera tricks are well-used, like when a sheep tumbling down a hill skids to a stop right in front of the camera. Raider apparently realized this, because he used it a second time, which turned it from a cool moment into an "Okay, it's neat, but show us something else now."

Raider's skill with the program picks up as it continues. The river scene is probably the highlight of the animation and scenery design in the movie, though until my second watch I was convinced that the story had completely lost cohesiveness here. The black sheep seems to disappear from the story and another one appears out of nowhere, and it seems kind of like the movie's sleepwalking. But look closely: The black sheep falls into the river and a white sheep comes out. Racial commentary or just a sheep turning out to be covered in soot and dirt? You make the call.

My favorite shot in the movie, by far, had to be a quick throwaway moment at the end, where a sheep puts together a catapult and sets a rock up on one side of it. There's no real point to this (I assume he's trying to hit the plane from earlier, and this is during the credits at the end), it's just there to be fun to watch. But when he sets up the rock and starts to move away, the rock falls off, and he turns around and positions it more carefully. It's nothing major, but it's a neat moment that gives the character a bit of personality instead of being a bunch of poorly animated spheres. Play around with that kind of thing, because it works.

As an actual movie, A Life of a Sheep doesn't match up to much. Most of it's attempts at cinematic vision fall pretty flat. But the important thing is that there ARE attempts, that there are a lot of different ones, and that they're actually relevant to the action being animated. For a first movie, it's surprisingly good, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Raider goes next.

Critical Score: 50/100.
Personal Score: 55/100.