They’re basically being taught that their work has no value. But you’re right that many people in our industry would see advertising work as “the ultimate goal,” which really illustrates the sad state of affairs that’s set up for many young animators. Well, I don’t avoid commercial work, I avoid advertising work. Why have you continued to avoid such gigs? these people are definitely not involved with shorts.Īfter the success of Rejected you were flooded with offers for commercial work, which many would see as the ultimate goal.
You walk down Main Street at Sundance and see a parade of stressed-out dealmakers dashing around screaming obscenities into their phones. So at a festival like Sundance, you’re not looking to sell the short as much as publicize it. So in the long while I’ve been doing this, it’s been an expanding experiment in inventing my own rules of self-distribution. Ha, well unfortunately it’s the distributor/studio systems that tend to circumvent all short films, not the other way around.
I also kind of liked how it was “His first digitally animated film!! Behold the future!!” after 20 years of pencil-and-paper animation, and it wound up kind of looking at times like it could have been made on primitive software in the 1990s. I’d been wanting to make a science-fiction film for a long time, I think, and my curiosity about finally trying out digital animation was a good excuse to take the plunge. I drew every panel of the story on yellow sticky notes. Vanity Fair: How did World of Tomorrow come to be? How old is its genesis?ĭon Hertzfeldt: The earliest bits of it appeared in a graphic novel I wrote in 2013 called The End of the World. Club, “possibly the best film of 2015”) available for rental on, which marks both his first foray into science fiction as well as digital animation. He recently made his 17-minute World of Tomorrow (Indiewire says it’s “one of the best films of 2015” and the Onion's A.V. Rendering his now-iconic stick figures frame by frame, by hand-see: carpal tunnel syndrome-his shorts truly run the gamut, whether the darkly comic horror of letting a friend overzealously yank stitches after surgery in Wisdom Teeth (2010), or the subject of memory loss and life itself in the greater context of the universe for his three-part opus It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2011). A 38-year-old autodidactic animator perhaps best known for Rejected, his absurdist breakthrough nominated for an Oscar for best animated short in 2000, Hertzfeldt’s vision has remained uncompromised throughout his nearly 20-year career. Don Hertzfeldt, by no means a household name, is a figure venerated in certain film circles.