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.

Snippet! I made this thing near the end of College Round 2 – my first collaboration with Caveh Zahedi outside of him being my Production teacher. There was a competition at CurrentTV to make a film about prejudice, and the winner would get, like, three grand. Caveh filmed a story about the time he caught himself being racist against Asians for a hot second, and I offered to help when it was clear Alan would have trouble animating the whole thing. We made the first version in a weekend, and my animation was atrocious. We didn’t win. But Current expressed interest in broadcasting it, so we gave it an overhaul and I completely re-did all the animation to the style you see here, and we got paid a lump sum for the effort.

Alan Peterson is responsible for the claymation, and he drew all those lovely borderless pastel backgrounds. He also came up with the idea of putting the squiggly white behind the characters to hint at a torn-paper draw cycle. I did all the drawn animation and much of the lipsynch.

Looking at this older stuff, I keep thinking how I could do it better now. I like some of my contribution a lot, but it’s very clearly a fresh animator trying to turn limited skills into a style. Smart tactic, but I’ve since improved. Doesn’t seem to be on CurrentTV anymore, either…

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2 clips from Cornography, a documentary about the US corn industry. This was the second time I did rotoscoping, and the first time I did the kind of compositing that I like to do when I rotoscope.

Er, right, what does that mean? Rotoscoping is when you trace video footage to make an animated image that moves very realistically. It’s a very meditative practice that I enjoy, and a good thing, too, because it takes hours and hours. By “compositing” I mean that I can take different still or moving images and, by rotoscoping them, make them appear to be in the same scene, or manipulate them to change their meaning. That dog was not, in fact, being walked by an ear of corn. (It was actually on a treadmill.)

I did temp voiceovers for this, but they were so much better than the guy the directors had in mind that I ended up doing all the narration myself. Also revamped bits of the script – “and then we eat the cow” and was my addition, and I wrote out a long, awful  list of corn puns like “darn near ear-resistible.” I should dig that out…