Friday, October 16, 2015

My HitRecord Story

In the Spring of 2013, I took a class called Surrealism and Film. The class kicked my butt, I never understood the films, and the word "surrealism" brings back painful memories. But for my final project we had to "create something surrealist," and I told my professor that I was interested in the idea of 2D animation.

We discussed how surrealist animators focus more on the process of drawing than on the outcome of the animation, and that by getting totally lost in each drawing, and letting creativity flow in a stream of consciousness style, I could create something very unique. She gave me 400 sheets of animation paper, a lightboard, and I got to work!


I started with an inspiration image, the first few frames of The Lion King, and my only goal was to never plan ahead, but to come up with what I would draw in each frame on the spot. With a DSLR camera I snapped the 360 pictures, uploaded them into Adobe Premiere, and at 12 drawings per second, I had a 30 second animation! 



Somehow I stumbled across Joseph Gordon-Levitt's website HitRecord a few months later, and uploaded the project there. Basically, HitRecord is a collective of artists looking to collaborate and create new work. Joseph Gordon-Levitt started the website as a way to give undiscovered artists an opportunity to showcase their work as well as work together. 

Soon enough, the art, performances, and videos were coming together, and the first 3 episodes of the new variety show, HitRecord on TV, premiered at Sundance in January 2014. They then aired the first season of 8 episodes, each with a unifying theme, on Pivot, from January to March 2014. 

This is where it gets good!


In November of 2014, one of the producers of HitRecord emailed me out of the blue, hoping to get in touch with me about an idea for a project. During a Skype call, we talked about me possibly doing another animation for a future episode, where the theme would be "The Number Two." I was so excited!

 On the inside:


On the outside:

I definitely thought I was finally being discovered.

So obviously I said yes! We went back and forth with some storyboards, I told them I wanted to do a 20 second animation that visualized some symbiotic relationships in the animal world as a way to express dualities in nature. 

This is from my original storyboard. A shark and remora enter, swim around each other, transform into yin and yang, that turns into an anemone and a clownfish, which becomes a dandelion and a bee, and finally a human blows the seeded dandelion into the air. We cut the shark because, as you can see, I can't draw sharks.

But 240 drawings later, I finished! Around Christmas of last year, I uploaded the animation to HitRecord's website. And what do you know, they used it! Season 2, Episode 2 "The Number Two" aired on June 19th, 2015. I should've participated in their sequence about what it's like to be the second child... what a missed opportunity!



But a few days ago, I finally got around to putting my animation on YouTube... for those who don't have the Pivot network on their TV. The experience was incredibly fun and if you're reading this, Pixar, I'm available.


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