I Want to Be Martian: A Stick Figure Love Letter to Space and Bradbury

122 seconds. Three voices. A Holst-Mars bass line in 5/4. A porch in the dark and a rover on Mars in 2035.

The Film

I Want to Be Martian is a Napkin Films short, dedicated to Ray Bradbury. A stick figure stands on a porch, looks up at a red planet through a child's telescope, and wants — specifically, and without apology — to go there. His wife joins the duet. Their consciousness uploads during the drop. By the outro, a rover is rolling across Martian regolith, and COGNITION is whispering, "I remember Earth. The blue was always the strange part."

Running time: 2:02. Resolution: 854×480 at 12fps. No GPU. No subscriptions. Every frame drawn in Python with PIL.

The Three Voices

The film has three characters, each with a distinct voice persona, color, and rhetorical position.

SELF (warm gold) is the joshua_self ElevenLabs persona. The longing voice. He watched a planet rise from a telescope a child made. He wants the rust, the dust, the claim. Galileo kept his mouth half closed; SELF will not. His lines move from hesitant warmth to full declaration by the chorus.

WIFE (mint green) is narrator_warm. She enters the duet in the second verse, asking what they would pack that the cold won't take, and singing the chorus back. She is the anchor. She is the reason the rover carries two.

COGNITION (ice blue) is narrator_deep, Daniel's voice. He opens the film with a single sentence — "I remember Earth" — and stays silent through the emotional verses. He returns during the DROP to narrate the upload sequence: "Booting. Booting. Consciousness handshake. Sol one. The light is pink." Then the film's closing tie-in, delivered as one confident fact: "Plan nine. The bunny in the machine."

The Story in Six Acts

Intro (0–7s). A Ligeti-style tone cluster bleeds into focus. Mars grows in a starfield. COGNITION whispers once and is gone.

Verse 1 (14–35s). SELF watches a planet rise through a telescope a child made, red as the hour he learned his name. Galileo saw the moons and kept his mouth half closed. He won't. Eight months in a tin can, two hundred days of the wrong sun. Tell me I'm crazy. Tell me you'll come.

Chorus (35–55s). The hook arrives. I want to be Martian. Walk the thin air home. I want to be Martian. I want to leave the Earth alone. WIFE joins halfway: Upload the blood, download the bone. Two of us inside one rover. Two of us, and never alone.

Verse 2 (56–75s). The duet. WIFE and SELF trade lines across the rising score: what do we pack, what do we leave, is this loneliness or is this love? SELF answers the last one: Both. Look up. Look up. Look up.

Drop (76–103s). The Kubrick corridor. A narrow hallway, perspective vanishing to a point, two figures walking toward the light. COGNITION handles the upload sequence. Reversed chord-clusters at 76s and 88s act as the consciousness handshake — a deliberate glitch, two bodies entering the wire at different moments. The bitcrush layer surfaces. "Sol one. The light is pink." The drop resolves not with celebration but with quiet insistence: I am here. I am here. I am here.

Outro (103–122s). A rover crosses Martian ground. COGNITION revisits the opening: "I remember Earth. The blue was always the strange part." Two whispered exchanges — "Red canal." / "Olympus." — before Daniel's final line closes the film's universe: Plan nine. The bunny in the machine.

The Score

Composed in ChipForge, rendered as a 116-second WAV at 140 BPM.

The foundation is a four-bar G-minor cycle (Gm–Cm–Eb–D) with a Holst-Mars-inflected bass ostinato in 5/4 time. The five-beat pattern creates forward momentum with a slight limp — the rhythm of something moving that was not built to stop.

The intro and outro use Ligeti-style tone clusters: stacked minor-second intervals in the pad channel, no clear tonal center, designed to feel like the edge of a signal from very far away.

The chorus gives the melody room. The bass ostinato drops to half-volume. A lead channel carries a hummable contour over the Gm–Cm–Eb progression. This is the only section where the score sounds like it intends to be liked.

The drop layers in an acrusher bitcrush effect that surfaces as the upload sequence begins. The signal degrades intentionally, as if the transmission is lossy. Reversed chord-cluster splashes at 76s and 88s are the "consciousness handshake" — a production choice borrowed from science fiction's long tradition of treating upload as an act of violence done to the self.

Mix philosophy: music is the lead; voices sit inside the music. SELF's verses run at 1.35× music swell. The drop runs at 1.18× with the bitcrush audible on top. The outro ducks to 0.82× for the whispered close.

The Visual Stack

Starfield. Three depth tiers (500, 280, and 90 stars) twinkle at different rates. The near tier gives the image depth.

Mars. A growing red circle that starts as a pinpoint and reaches the upper-right quadrant by the drop. Atmospheric tinting at the edge from deep red to Mars-horizon orange.

The porch. A stick figure at a telescope, silhouetted against night blue. Telescope drawn manually — tube, eyepiece, base, finder scope. A hint of the house. Very sparse.

The rocket. Liftoff during verse 2. Fire effect, exhaust plume, shrinking Earth in the porthole. Two white silhouettes visible through the glass.

The Kubrick corridor. A narrow hallway in deep blue-white with a perspective vanishing point. Two figures walking toward it. Influenced directly by the 2001 stargate sequence: long corridor, figures that do not run.

The rover. Martian regolith, red and grey, tire tracks across the frame, solar panels extended. A small machine in a large frame. The planet is not hostile. It is just not home yet.

The Easter Eggs

The final line. "Plan nine. The bunny in the machine." Daniel delivers this after the emotional outro whispers, as a single confident sentence. The bunny appears in every Napkin Films production somewhere in the machinery, and someone always names him at the end.

"Red canal." / "Olympus." Lowell's Martian canals (1895 illusions, never real) and Olympus Mons (21km high, the largest volcano in the solar system). Two whispers that do not require embellishment.

The closing camera. The rover's tire tracks cut straight across the frame. No dramatic zoom, no sunrise. Just a machine on a planet, making tracks.

What This Proves

The previous films tested the pipeline under pressure: Stars Press Start pushed TTS toward musical performance. Plan 9 Rap Battle pushed autotune toward something that sounds like rap. I Want to Be Martian tests whether the same tools can handle sincerity.

Sincerity is harder. Rap is aggressive, and aggression gives you something to work with. Longing is diffuse. The voice has to carry it without the score covering for it.

The answer: mostly yes. SELF's warm-to-declaration arc holds across the full run. WIFE's duet lines land on pitch. COGNITION's bookended "I remember Earth" frames the film as a memory — not a manifesto, a recollection.

The Holst ostinato gives the score directional momentum that prevents it from feeling like ambient wallpaper. The 5/4 rhythm does not let the listener settle, which is correct for a film about someone who does not want to stay.

Three voices were worth the extra API calls. The SELF/WIFE duet in verse 2 is the best thirty seconds in any Napkin Films production to date.

The Stack

Animation: Python + PIL, stick figures drawn frame-by-frame, 854×480 at 12fps
Music: ChipForge, G-minor, 140 BPM, Holst-Mars 5/4 ostinato, Ligeti tone-cluster bookends, acrusher drop layer
Voice: ElevenLabs v3, three personas (joshua_self, narrator_warm, narrator_deep), plain TTS — no autotune on this one
Assembly: FFmpeg, stem-preserving finalmix, per-section swell and ducking, aphaser on music, reversed chord-cluster consciousness handshake
Direction: Claude Code, agent mode

No GPU. No subscriptions beyond ElevenLabs. No animation software.

Watch I Want to Be Martian on YouTube.

For the full Napkin Films origin story, Four Films From Code covers how the architecture works and why constraint is the feature. The autotune pipeline that preceded this one: Stars Press Start and Plan 9 Rap Battle. The Agentic Development post explains the agent mode workflow underneath all of it.

License. This film is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Share and adapt with attribution to "Organic Arts LLC" and a link to the original, non-commercial use only. Engine code is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed. Contact: j@organicartsllc.com

Dedicated to Ray Bradbury, who knew the red planet better than anyone who had been there.

Produced with Napkin Films and ChipForge, open source tools built by Joshua Ayson and AI agents at Organic Arts LLC.