Snippet! My second collab with Caveh, and my first crack at rotoscoping. After One Minute Racist, Caveh wanted to do another animated film. He had this audio from a story he’d told at Porchlight in San Francisco, so we set about dramatizing it.

This project sat on a back burner for well over a year, but I hit the skids in early 2009 when I couldn’t find work. I contacted Caveh and said, “Let’s finish that short!” It was the only conceivable way to get paid at the time. Alan had backed out of the project by now, so I had to come up with a way to animate the talking narrator portion without claymation. (Hence the rotoscoping.) In the end, this film had 4 different styles – you can see the sketchbook scene, and a bit of the silhouetted rotoscope (Caveh pantomimed in front of a camera with the audio playing off his iPod); there was also a cartoony style for most of the story, similar to my portions of One Minute Racist, and a semi-realistic style for a film shoot toward the end (I was never entirely happy with that last one).

I worked about 70 hours a week on it for a month to get it done so I could pay late rent. I’ve probably never worked that hard on anything in my life – it was weirdly glorious, but only survivable because there was a deadline in sight. The closest I’ve ever come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt is we’re both on Wholphin #9.