hi it's don hertzfeldt (filmmaker) how are you? AMA

Are you happy?

oh no, this is the highest voted question? i guess thanks for the thought. but look, depressed people usually can't get out of bed let alone animate something for years. i think i'm pretty happy. i think i have resting sad face. but yeah i am happy. i mean, i can make the films i want to make, whenever i want to, and i don't have to wear a tie most of the time

I feel a bit awkward kind of debunking what you said there but as it’s a mental health issue it’s too important to let pass so for the benefit of anyone reading: not at all true that “depressed people usually can’t get out of bed let alone x”.

In fact that is one of the reasons men in particular fail to get help before attempting suicide - the stigma and perception around depression is that if you’re getting up and going to work and doing stuff then you aren’t depressed. When of course ANYONE with any sort of lifestyle can be depressed or suicidal, and it doesn’t show until they try to take their own life. There are olympic athletes with depression, police officers with depression, politicians and electricians and yep animators all getting up every day and living with depression.

If anyone is reading this and needs help, reach out to your nearest hospital or mental health charity (in the UK Samaritans are very good).

you are, of course, correct.

what i was trying to say was, when i am depressed the last thing i want to do is go create something. because, to me, creating something takes a hell of a lot of optimism. but the same is definitely not true for everyone.

I don't have to wear a tie most of the time

What about pants

;)

Where do you do most of your thinking?

i think it might be the shower

There are dozens of us

get out of my shower

• Have you ever encountered any instances where someones finger became in part or totally severed?

• What is your favorite line from the crowd of people all saying things in The Meaning of Life?

• Why no merch? Im a consumer whore! I want t shirts! Even better: a holographic shirt of Emily Prime waving her arms back and forth, and stickers, and mugs, and an imessage app and and and lasers that shoot the world of tomorrow episode two directly into peoples brains!

years ago we used to have merch, shirts and junk, but it was always such a nuisance to stock and create that we sort of shaved it all down to dvds and blu-rays. we made some special "i am so proud of you" snow globes that were my favorite. i've wanted to make weird toys but have never found the time to really investigate. who wants to make weird toys?

Hi Don,

I'm going to ramble uncontrollably before I ask my question.

I remember being so excited to see Rejected on Adult Swim back in 2001, only to learn that it had been canceled (though later postponed) for including the words "Sweet Jesus." I eventually caught it the following year when it aired and have been enamored with your work ever since.

I absolutely cannot miss my chance to say THANK YOU. I lost both of my grandmothers to Alzheimers/dementia not far apart, and shortly after that, I lost my father at a young age (he was only 51) back in 2011. I fell into a pretty heavy depression for a while and though I never became suicidal, I shut myself off from friends, family, the world. It lasted for a while.

The following year, I saw (the feature length) It's Such a Beautiful Day for the first time. I can't even accurately put into words how deeply it affected me. The feelings and notions you were able to so effortlessly capture and portray just floored me. There's of course a deep sadness in ISaBD, but there's also a profound sense of renewed hope underneath it all.

I still make it a point to watch ISaBD at least once a year, sometimes more. (The Blu-Ray quality is fantastic.) I watched a few days after I proposed to my (at-the-time) girlfriend, I watched it the DAY before we left on our honeymoon after getting married, and I most recently watched it not long after finding out my wife was pregnant. To this day, no other film can make me laugh and cry like this one does. No other film draws me into such a deep state of awe, melancholy, and reflection, only to pull me out my the end and reassure me that everything is going to be okay. It will forever hold a place in my personal top 10 of all-time. I couldn't miss my one opportunity to let you know how positively your work has affected me. And to thank you for doing what you do.

Now the actual question!

Growing up, what other filmmaker(s)/artist(s) were your biggest inspiration(s)? Whose work affected you so deeply that you eventually decided, "that's what I want to do for the rest of my life?"

(Also, because why not -- favorite movie of all-time?)

thank you for this... i'm so glad to hear you're doing well - and congratulations!

my whole life i've wanted to make movies. it's honestly really weird. i have no memory of ever not wanting to make movies. i don't think i've ever known how weird this was until i went to college and met people who didn't know what they wanted to major in yet. i just couldn't understand it. i had felt programmed in one direction my entire life, how could they be so free and not know?

growing up i really only remember two things about movies that drove it home that this is what i want to do. one was seeing "the empire strikes back" in the cinema when i was 4 or 5. i don't remember much from that age but i remember details of the movie theater and even individuals in the audience around us. there was no turning back by then. and the other thing was seeing "2001" around the same time. the dawn of man sequence is still one of the most terrifying things i've ever seen somehow and for a little kid i just couldn't believe that human beings could make music and images come together like that

How do you manage to present the effects of mental illness and emotions so well in your work? I've never known someone who was able to represent things like sensory overload and dissociation so well. It's amazing how relatable your characters are.

thank you but i'm sorry i don't know if i have a very good answer. i try to move in directions that feel right on the screen... things don't always have to make sense or even have a logical explanation as they have to feel right. maybe writing a book is the same. you can't live the experiences and emotions of all your characters in a story to display them factually somehow, so instead you have to create the impression of them. and in a movie you can use movement and sound. i think if anything it just requires a lot of empathy

Hi Don,

I've notices you use classical music in all of your films. Is this to avoid paying to license music? (Assuming the classical is in public domain)

If so, where do you find such high quality recordings of the pieces? They are simply beautiful.

Thanks for your time.

the sound mix and music have always been so hugely important to me - i do all my own sound and have now reached the point of even running the 5.1 mixdown board by myself - that the thought of handing off a film to a composer and not really knowing what music i'll get back is just totally alien to me now. maybe something's wrong with me but i just can't get to that level of trust with something so big. i would probably need to be working with composers i can't afford

Something I am struggling with as a twenty-something who creates is self-doubt. Your work is vulnerable, beautiful, and profound: how do you dive in, embrace emotion, and create despite doubt?

Thank you, Don!

there's always going to be doubt and that's what pushes you to improve and learn. doubt is what makes you rewrite and repair and push things further. it's probably better to have doubt about your work - to be able to recognize and identify the flaws that bother you and work to fix them - than to be totally arrogant and oblivious and release something awful. working independently gives you the one luxury of not having to release something until you feel like it's (mostly) ready. towards the end of production i'm no longer watching the movie but just scanning the frame for flaws.

(on the other hand, releasing anything to the public also requires a bit of arrogance. it always feels like a really weird thing to do)

I'll just ask the obvious questions while I think of something better:

• How's Antarctica going?

• Do you have any plans in regards of future World of Tomorrow episodes? The 2nd one was incredible, somehow more poignant and even better developed than the first one. I read somewhere that you where planing on downplaying the Emily's in the future, is this still correct?

"antarctica" is sort of in limbo right now. about a year ago we were funded for a series of visual tests - the animation i had in my head for the project is sort of something i had never really seen before - and we set up shop for those animation tests with phil tippett in berkeley. usually you work with somebody who's very good with character animation or who's very good with visual effects and with phil you get both, he's a hero. also the last time i was in the studio i spotted this guy: http://www.bitterfilms.com/phil.jpeg

so his studio delivered wonderful work, the tests look cool and interesting and are a good first step but we realized pretty quickly that going in this direction with the visuals would mean a $70 million movie. which is quite a bit more than our producer or anyone was planning on. so there's still a lot to talk about and figure out..

IT'S A WRAP

haaaa

Hi, Don. Absolutely love your work. It’s Such A Beautiful Day is my one of my favorite films of all time.

What’s next? Are you considering turning World of Tomorrow into a three parter? What ever happened to the Antarctica project we kept hearing about?

Also, what do you think about Black Mirror? I’ve noticed similar concepts in the show to what you showed in the first World of Tomorrow.

i don't think "world of tomorrow" will be a three parter. it doesn't feel like a trilogy. i was very careful to call this one episode two, and not chapter two or part two... right now these feel looser and freer to sort of go all over the place without the trappings of an overarching 3 part thing. so right now two "world of tomorrows" or seven "world of tomorrows" feels a lot more natural than three "world of tomorrows".

no i've not seen "black mirror" but i've heard about it. i don't often have the free time to catch up with stuff. i still haven't seen "breaking bad." i did see the first episode of the new "twin peaks" and loved it and am looking forward to that next

the new twin peaks is totally worth it. are you a lynch fan in general?

yes

Hey I just wanted to say that bought your book, The End of the World, and it is now apparently on Amazon worth $10,000. Should I sell it and also would you potenially sign it if I ship it to ya or something? Thanks for being the best guy in the whole filmmaking world.

yeah i saw that too. at one point the book was $14,999 so i guess now it is on sale. we're planning on finally printing more copies of those, maybe in a couple of months

first of all, you're my hero, so there's that.

second, where do you see yourself in 5 years?

as your enemy

With the ease of online distribution, would you recommend a no-budget animator starting out try to enter some major festivals to kickstart their career?

yes, absolutely i would recommend that. and don't just submit to major festivals. an audience in mudtown is just as good as an audience at cannes. don't discriminate. ANY captive audience these days is a blessing. but yes no-budget filmmakers of all shapes and sizes should still be submitting to festivals. for one thing, if you're able to attend there's no substitute for seeing your work on the big screen, with an audience (particularly if it's a comedy). you are going to learn so much. (even though it's on-demand now, i still wish more people can have the chance to see WOT2 on the big screen... it is an entirely different experience for both them and me). beyond that the festivals are still valuable for publicity... winning a big award or getting legitimate reviews from critics at festival screenings will bring more eyeballs to your work when it appears elsewhere. sorry if this answer feels a bit clipped but i'm typing as fast as i can think :)

How did you wind up doing a Simpsons couch gag?

they asked me, really out of the blue. it was odd, when i first started drawing homer for it, well that squid version of him, it came out really perfect on my first try and i was sort of proud and impressed with myself and then it dawned on me that i used to draw the simpsons endlessly when i was 13 and it was all just muscle memory.

Hi Don! I'm a big fan of your work! I was wondering, Do you have any good animating tips for beginners?

animation isn't really what i do best but i will say one thing, i stumbled across richard williams' book, the animator's survival kit many many years after i had taught myself animation and was by then a "professional" and i was ANGRY because it was full of wonderful exercises and tips and all of these things i suffered through having to learn by myself. basically i could have avoided a load of mistakes if i had read it in the beginning. i was lucky enough to meet him at an oscar thing a couple years ago and i told him all this and he said, "don, it's taken me my entire life. i'm in my eighties now but i feel like i've finally mastered it. i've finally after all this time mastered animation. and now the big joke is if i will live long enough to do anything with it." he's our michelangelo of 2D animation but he constantly felt like he was still learning. and i certainly feel like i will never stop learning... i bash into walls over and over again on every project. but sometimes they are different and new walls. so that's my own advice... never stop learning.

Don, what started your fascination with Airport carpet patterns? Love WoT and WoT II, favorite shorts of all time alongside La Jetée!

i have to travel a lot to different theaters and stuff around the country and i started to pay close attention to airport carpet patterns. it's kind of fascinating. sometimes you see little subliminal arrows in the designs or pointy aircraft, to inspire movement. i've always wondered if they are designed specifically for that one airport or if there is a big airport carpet catalog somewhere that the people maintaining the terminal have to thumb through and choose.

Doesn't Claire Danes husband have a website dedicated to this?

!

What does your niece think about some of the existential-crises-inducing sci-fi ideas explored in the World of Tomorrow films?

she liked the first one but preferred "frozen"

the saw the second one only a couple of weeks ago and i haven't had a chance to pick her brain about it yet.

she's eight years old now and she's definitely aware of their popularity, it's just hard to know how much she processes it all from scotland. she sent me a really nice good luck note before i went to the oscars.

when she was five or six she had to write a sentence about herself in school and she wrote, "i am beautiful. and famous."

Hi Don! Thank you for all that you do. It's a real privilege getting to watch the work you share.

What's your favorite quote or scene that didn't make it into World of Tomorrow ep 2? Why did you cut it? Every line was so sharp and felt important. So watching made me realize that you probably had to do quite a bit of trimming, some of which didn't come easily (especially when you have the cutest voice actor around, Winona Mae!)

yes there were loads of things cut from WOT2. it is probably the most rewritten thing i've ever had to wrangle with because my sort-of cowriter was a five year old and in the beginning, none of the audio i was getting out of her was fitting. there's one sequence i began animating and abandoned early on, and there's loads of things i wrote and recorded julia saying that i ended up not needing... entire monologues.

i began writing WOT2 the summer "inside out" came out and when i heard about its premise i sort of panicked and refused to see it until i had finished writing because both things spend time in someone's head. i didn't want "inside out" to color or poison any of the ideas i was working on. i was also kind of concerned that "inside out" would come out first and if my thing was similar people would think i was doing a satire or something. luckily they're pretty different movies. but the following december i saw my niece again and recorded her some more to get try some supplementary material and she had seen "inside out" by then and wouldn't stop talking about it. so i did have audio of her talking about that movie... and for maybe five minutes i thought it would be kind of funny if emily prime just straight up says mid-film, "this is a lot like inside out". so anyway as difficult as her audio was to work with and write around, i would say my favorite bits that were cut were things winona said.

hello don. thanks for making beautiful art.

what is a song that you have been listening to a lot as of late?

the soundtrack to "phantom thread"

What is your favourite album of 2002?

ok i had to do some research here but i think it might be tom waits "blood money" but that's open for debate

What are your thoughts about online financial supports for artists like patreon or kickstarter?

for independents you usually have to go with whatever works. if audiences and artists can find each other on those platforms and everyone's happy then that's great.

i've been a little curious if platforms like kickstarter are feeding into something more interesting about an audience's psychology. i kickstarted a blu-ray, mainly to gauge if there was enough interest in releasing one in the first place. i assumed most people were turning away from physical media and was proven to be super wrong... the kickstarter went incredibly well. but i am also convinced that if i had just went and made the blu-ray the traditional way and tried to sell it, we definitely would not have sold so many so fast. kickstarter seems to take that rush people get from ordering something online (is there a word for that?) and really amplify it.

How do you feel knowing you’re the reason I wanted to become a better artist and person? HMM?!

drunk with power

Any chance of reprinting End of the World?

yep i just answered that elsewhere actually but yep. a resounding yep.

When will I be able to put World of Tomorrow 2 into the movie hole in my bluray player?

i don't know.. it seems odd to make a bluray for just a single short film. i'm not sure if there would be enough people to want it. are there enough people to want it? it seems odd because most everything else has already been released on the blu-ray anthology so it would have to be a weird solo thing. a special edition blu-ray "single" ? tell you what, if this comment gets enough upvotes i'll think about it?

I have long wondered what the sound effect is in Rejected, 2.5 minutes in when the angry ticks fly outta his nipples? A cow? Air raid siren?

You're great! Stay warm!

if i remember correctly that's a cow moo slowed wayyyyy down

Do you have financially lean periods as a self-sufficient artist? Do you ever teach or consult to keep flush? What were the years leading up to being self-sufficient like for you, in practical terms?

things aren't as financially lean anymore but yes that used to be a constant thing. i never took a side job because i wouldn't have the time to do both my thing and their thing... it just wasn't an option. back when i was shooting on film i worked so slow a short would take on average 18-24 months to complete. so instead i just scrabbled through the mud until i'd have something new to finish, release, and use that money to finance the next thing. if any of those early projects failed i'm not sure what i would have done about it.

i did teach one time at my alma mater, a single summer class about 15 years ago but i was pretty bad at it. i remember running into the department chair in a post office and she said, "hey have you ever considered coming back and teaching? it could just be for a quarter, you can do whatever you like. unfortunately we can't pay much, only low 5 figures" and i thought, low 5 figures for one quarter, hey that's pretty good maybe i should try that. and i wrote a class on animation from the ground up and got to work that quarter and when i went to get my only paycheck i realized she had misspoke, it was low 4 figures.

Ah, forgot to include this question: What are some books you read in the past three years that had an impact on you, good or bad?

i've been in production or traveling for so much of the last few years i haven't been able to get through any of the books i've been hoping to, i have a big dumb pile that has just been staring at me with a really disappointed expression on its book-pile-face. i'm finally in a space now where i haven't started work on something new and all-encompassing yet and can sort of drift around and finally read again and watch things... and also go to the dentist the eye doctor and all the other normal life things i've been missing. yes i am a shambling mess

As an aspiring filmmaker what is the ultimate advice you would give to anyone who wants to make movies? How much are your dreams involve in your work? What is your life for and what do you think your doing with it?

"What is your life for and what do you think your doing with it?"

fuuuuuck

Have you seen the homage to World of Tomorrow in season 3 of Fargo? Curious to hear what you think about it and whether you find it a strange sensation to have inspired such specific stylistic mimicry.

i did see it. i had a nice conversation with noah a while back, he seems like a good guy, they asked if i could write and animate it but at the time their idea for the sequence was like 23 minutes of animation that would span the entire season. and i said i wish i could do it but just wouldn't be able to do it quickly enough. and that was the last i heard about it until the episode came out. i haven't seen the rest of fargo so i don't really know the context but i do kind of wish they'd gone in a different direction... it just seems to have confused and upset a lot of people who assumed i did do it.

Hi Don, first of all, congrats on World of Tomorrow Episode 2. It is a fantastic sequel and both parts make up an incredible series.

When you first started making movies, was it a conscious decision to do shorts? Like, was it your preference? Or was that mostly a function of budget constraints (or some other constraints)? Do you ever worry about the 'prestige' of doing shorts vs. doing full length films? Much like authorship, it seems shorter movies aren't taken nearly as seriously as feature length films.

I hope 2018 is good to you and I look forward to whatever you make next.

it was not an original preference, no, but i guess it grew into one. i made four student films in the 90s that all found distribution and made money, which was really unusual. i seemed to have hit upon something that worked so i kept on in that direction because they were profitable... but i quickly realized i also had everything i wanted as a filmmaker... i didn't have to pitch, i didn't have to spend months trying to raise money or find a crew, i didn't have to spend all day in meetings, i could just start writing a project on my own and then go make it. because the audience was there. i didn't realize for quite some time how unusual and lucky that is.

and i think now we're in a space where audiences no longer really care about running times. "world of tomorrow" was the first short film to ever stream on netflix by itself and it was sort of a non-event... nobody really said anything about it being a short, people just recommended it to each other like it was anything else. i think streaming has become a great equalizer... people don't care anymore if something is 12 hours of binge-watching or a great 2 minute short, they just want to see something good.

think about the average running time of a feature film... not so long ago, in order to see a movie, everyone had to leave the house, park the car, have dinner with your date, stand in line and watch a movie in a theater. if they only screened a short it wouldn't be worth all the effort... but they also couldn't screen 5 hour epics or the exhibitors would be upset because they wouldn't be able to run it as many times in a day. we really only settled on this 90-120 minute running time for a movie as a compromise. it had nothing really to do with any artistic reason: it was just long enough, but not too long. and so often movies get crammed into this running time. i've seen plenty of features that would have made great short films but were super padded and i've seen plenty of features that should have been much longer but were chopped down to meet an arbitrary requirement.

I'm ok. My fiancee recently left me. But thank you for asking. How are you doing?

your fiancee and i are doing great thanks

no just kidding sorry. you did set me up there though

Hey Don, It's Such A Beautiful Day is one of my all time favourites.

Was there a specific reason that you switched from your previous hand drawn on paper style to using computer based animation software? (I love both styles btw just curious)

primarily because it was faster. i had spent the first 20 years animating everything with paper and cameras and after "it's such a beautiful day" i felt totally exhausted with possibly nothing more to offer. i took a year or so off. i wanted to start over and make a film in a completely different way and throw out all of my old habits

What was the process with making the final scene in "It's such a beautiful day"? How did you feel making it?

the final sequence of "beautiful day" was originally an idea for an entirely different movie. what if someone just can't die? through no fault of their own, for unknown reasons, he just can't die? it was just an interesting half-baked thing in my head for a while and i don't think i realized it made sense to be the ending for the 3rd movie until i was already many months in production on it. the original idea for the ending of the 3rd one had already been stolen by me to use as the ending for the 2nd one... i had very little leftover when i started writing the 3rd one. i don't remember if i had even decided on an ending for the 3rd one when i started animating it (probably not).

so i was excited to use it for the ending because it really opened up the movie... but i was tired. i was so tired by that point. i don't think i felt much of anything after finishing it other than just being really tired.

I just wanted to say that It's such a beautiful day is my favorite film of all time. It left an extremely lasting impact on me and i was recently able to finally order a physical copy of it (it should be arriving in the mail soon!). My question is: Will there ever be another chapter in the life of Bill, or is his story completely over now?

i haven't thought about it in years so i'm pretty sure it's done

I was in Austin about 7 or 8 years ago, and have read since it is quite different. Has it changed a lot for the worse, or better?

i feel like anyone who lives anywhere for long enough will say everything is getting worse

Are you happy with doing short films for the moment or do you plan on making another feature length soon?

i don't have a plan yet for what's next and that's maybe the best feeling of all. i'm going to spend some time floating around until something pulls me one way or another

Don, what is the secret code in the front pages of your book The End of the World for?

it wouldn't be a secret code if that wasn't a secret, now would it?

H Mr. Hertzfeldt, your stories are so unique, I was just wondering if you had any directorial advice? Thank you! :~)

think about all the things in other people's movies that really bother you and then don't do them

What kind of software did you use to create The World of Tomorrow?

(I know it's kind of a weird question, but the visuals of it are so wacky I can't help but wonder)

it's just a real old version of photoshop and a real old version of final cut. that's all. i mix sound in protools. i haven't learned aftereffects. i tried out some animation software in the beginning of WOT but i didn't like any of the brushes. photoshop is real clunky and crashy for animation, well this version of it at least, but they had the best brushes i could find.

Your fan-fiction comment to another question reminded me: do you harbor some secret truth about which of Bill's memories were invented? Thinking specifically of the Wyoming folks and their inheritance of faith, hallucinations, etc. Bill's family's genogram--taking all of his knowledge at face value--is beautiful.

yes sort of. along with the specific medical details of bill's illness. just general stuff that is never meant to be in the story but helps you write because you know where the walls are

Hey, was your niece any more aware that you were recording her for WoT 2 than she was the first time around?

no i don't think she was. i've recorded her annually now between the ages of 4 and 8. there's a lot of audio in the bank. i think she's a little more aware now when the ipad is around that it's possibly recording, but she likes the films so she either forgets about it or is letting me think she does.

One thing that really interested me from your most recent AMA/your online journal is that you said (something along the lines of) you don't watch many animations, they just are the form that best suits the stories you want to tell in the way you want to tell them.

Do you or would you ever have a place online where you chronicle some of the art/movies/music/anything that have inspired you most? Would be very interested in that.

Also, since I mentioned the online journal, do you plan to sporadically keep that up or has twitter become your go to?

Thank you for making what you have made, It's Such A Beautiful Day just might be the single most important piece of artwork to me and I still can't quite believe how great WoT2 is.

i really truly have to train myself to get back to writing in my journal. twitter should not be anyone's go-to for anything. i just get so busy the journal gets washed out of my mind. but i can say without a doubt that the one thing i'm most proud of writing, ever, is that journal. it's just years of nonsense but it's the only catalog i have of every single production since the late 90s.

when you animate, the days and weeks go by in a very blurry fashion. you don't remember much, at least i don't. i think the brain only forms new memories when something unusual happens in your life. i couldn't tell you what happened at thanksgiving in 2009 because most thanksgivings are sort of the same. but i do remember the one thanksgiving when the toilet broke and everyone had to drive to the jack and the box to use the restroom. and when you're working on a weird project like this for a long time you settle into this sort of routine where not much unusual happens day to day and all of your time sort of smears together. that journal has been the only thing that helps me unsmear it and remember where all that time went

Are you ok? After long cycles of work, what do you do to just get the fuck away from everything?

i murder

just casual murdering though

how do you keep track of all of your ideas, inspirations, jokes, drawings, etc.?

i used to scribble everything down on post-it notes that littered the house but i'd lose them so now i jot them down in my ipad. i have a really bad memory and i can't tell you how many ideas and scenes have been lost because i don't write it down in the moment. you always assume you'll remember something later. when it comes time to write the movie i'm not really writing at that point as much as i'm just gathering up all of those notes

Hey Don, how do you like your coffee?

i've never been a coffee drinker

Walt Disney, Bob Clampett, or Jim Henson?

is this one of those fuck/marry/kill things?

Hi. I'm a fan.

I especially admire your taste in music. When you hear a piece that particularly grabs you, do you already "see" a scene in a potential film to go along with it? Or do you more or less complete your projects before taking music into consideration?

love you

a little of both... the best is when i have the music for a scene in my head ahead of time... or even if the music can flavor and inspire a scene as i'm writing it. i play piano, all of the piano music in the WOT films, even the thing i did for the simpsons, is me playing, which is a great help because i can try out new music that way and as i practice maybe file away pieces that might work someday for this thing or that. other times if i have no luck early on i'll need to figure out the music sort of last minute and in those moments it's really just tearing through CD collections until i finally can find something that works. the beethoven in WOT2 was one of those last minute situations, it's in the middle of the movie where things could start to sag a little bit (the guy with the haircut), and i really desperately needed to find something energetic for that scene to keep us speeding along to the final third.

Hi Don, I'm an absolutely massive fan of your work. I saw you at the LACMA for World of Tomorrow 2, I've got a signed Blu-ray of your collected work, and I actually have a tattoo of Bill on my arm. I'll go ahead and circumvent the paragraphs where I gush about how much your stuff means to me and get right to my questions.

1. What is your feedback process like? Do you have people who you go to regularly when you're writing or developing your projects?

2. The first World of Tomorrow felt much like your earlier work, stylistically speaking, but World of Tomorrow 2 seemed to utilize the digital animation and 3d space in a more pronounced way. Was this a conscious choice going into it, or did it happen naturally? Is it something you'd like to continue to push with your work?

3. At LACMA, you talked about how earlier this year you were doing development tests in Berkley(?) for a feature concept, but didn't go into any more detail. Is there anything more you can share about that?

Thanks again for doing the AMA. I look eagerly forward to whatever you release next!

hello (again)

i think 1 and 3 were answered elsewhere here but here is 2. i think it was probably as simple as "hey i sort of know what i'm doing now a little bit more." the first WOT was literally the first thing i had ever drawn on a tablet before. i am still really naive to all the digital tools now at my fingertips but in 2015 i was relatively clueless.

the only problem the second time around was the old software i was using kept crashing and exploding beyond its limits because while i was learning new tricks and trying new things, i also didn't want to upgrade anything and do something to make the two films look drastically different from each other. but now that i'm between projects i will get software that was made in this decade.

Hi Don, I'm a huge fan of your work. I was counting the days to finally watch Episode 2, and expectations were exceeded. I hope that in the future there will be an opportunity to watch a movie of yours on the big screen. I think we live in a good time of animation, with great series and movies, either on the big screen or in communities such as vimeo. Can you tell us what has excited you the most? I loved your movies choices for The Criterion Collection, I didn't know Koyaanisqatsi and blow my mind.

hello and thank you

i am usually real out of the loop but somewhat-recent animated shorts i've really liked lately...

"manoman"

"wednesday with goddard"

"i am alone and my head is on fire"

"pineapple calamari"

"snowfall"

"pussy" by renata gasiorowska

anything by reka bucsi

"fox and the whale"

What's your favourite film of 2017?

Loved WOT2 btw, beautiful work!

i enjoyed "the killing of a sacred deer"

Hey Don!

If you were forced to watch one sequence from any of your films on loop for the rest of time, which would it be?

oh hi welcome to my nightmare

Hi Don; thanks for doing another AMA.

In many of your physical works (DVDs, The End of the World book), you place detailed, entertaining items in place of traditional copyright pages, promotional leaflets, and so on. When did you start doing that? Do you have a favorite little easter egg in any of the items you've sold?

i think that started with our very first physical release. i'm not very good with layout so the fine print is sort of the only fun i ever have when designing all of those casewraps and covers and things

i'm sort of partial to the booklet in the bluray only because so many people seem confused by it

Do you ever get together with Mike Judge, Richard Linklater, and Robert Rodriguez?

no but i did meet terrence malick the other day

Hey! Do you adhere to a specific philosophy? Which school of thought influenced your work the most?

i don't know if i've found one that i liked enough to dive into... every time i read philosophy i really enjoy it but i always wind up with unresolved counter-arguments in my head as i go. or maybe that's the point? maybe i'm not smart enough.

Hi Don,

I went to see World Of Tomorrow Vol. 2 in NYC at the IFC center a few weeks ago, and I'm almost positive I saw you out on the street maybe a block or so from the theatre maybe an hour/hour and half before the show. The show itself was fantastic!! Seeing your films on the big screen, in an actual theater was beyond words! Thank you for taking the time to do another tour!

Afterwards, I REALLY had to use the restroom - sure enough it was located downstairs right by backstage entrance/exit was, and I ran into you again. I didn't want you to think I was some crazed fan, so I just said 'great show' while passing you in the hallway. Pretty sure that's the closest I'll come to meeting any of my personal heroes.

Anyway, I did want to ask you this though: Do you ever struggle with motivation or a lack of energy when making your films? If so, do you have any advice for self motivating and finding a way to keep pursuing a dream? How do you tell yourself to keep going when it's tough and impossible?

Thank you!

hey thanks

and thank you also for not asking me that in the restroom hallway

when things are seeming tough and impossible, try to identify what's so tough and impossible about it. that sounds pretty dumb and simple but very often we are too close to a project to actually see it. step away from it for a few days and look at it from another angle. maybe the drama needs to be a comedy. maybe it should take place 2000 years in the future. do whatever you need to do to make it exciting to work on again. writing is 99% rewriting. don't stop until it clicks again.

animating is terribly dull, at least for me, and it is the least spontaneous way to make a movie. you're grinding it out one frame at a time. finding ways to get that rare feeling of surprise and spontaneity in something that's made so slowly - whether it's my niece saying something unexpected, or suddenly rewriting something i'm already halfway done with - is really helpful for me to stay plugged in.

Favorite restaurant in austin?

el chilito!

What do you do for a living? Does being an independent animator really gives you enough for a living?

yes, as long as people keep buying tickets

What are your thoughts on your old shorts?

they are kind of hard to watch, maybe like re-reading your old diary. not YOUR old diary, my old diary. your old diary is great. the old films are OK but i've noticed how none of my student films ever seem to go away. which is maybe a unique thing about animation, i don't know. but you never hear about a live action filmmaker's student films. like, never. even if they're real famous directors the student films are just sort of forgotten and maybe pushed to one side as a footnote. but for better or worse i can't seem to escape my student films. people still like to rank them and discuss them alongside the other ones. i guess maybe because they're all shorts? but it's funny... someone will ask a deep question about one of them maybe not realizing that i was 19 and barely knew how to make my hair look right let alone operate the camera

Now that you're digital, what tools are you using? I'm specifically interested in what you're using for the fun 3D background things you're making, like the rotating "flowers."

the effect of the rotating flowers is so dumb that i'm afraid to tell another animator because they'd be so unimpressed

hi don, thank you for doing another ama. i have been following your work since the early 00s when i was in high school. in a lot of ways, your work has had a huge impact on my life. i have an "everything will be ok" tattoo. i really don't think that young me watching 'rejected' in poor quality in someone's basement would have believed that if i told her. thank you for continuing to create.

kinda in that vein, my question for you is what is something in your life that you would never have anticipated the effect it would have on you?

thanks again, even if you don't answer, and i hope you have a good day despite the head cold.

you know, more interesting to me than the big things having an effect, like deciding to go here for school or deciding to rent this apartment over that one, are the little things we rarely pay attention to. if i hadn't gone to the supermarket on this one day at this specific time, i wouldn't have run into this person who asked me to do this one thing, which is how i met this other person and X, Y, Z and your entire life has a new path. why did i need to go to the supermarket that day? what was it i needed? what parking space did i find to sync it perfectly for me to meet that one person? the flow of it all seems so tenuous and weirdly easy to screw up. which i guess is life. when i do screenings and a few hundred people show up i wonder what they all would have been doing that night instead, if i wasn't doing a show - and if any of their lives might be that much different now one way or another

Hey Don!

I've read your previous writing where you've talked about how art students are being trained to not value their work/make work for others more than making the work they want to make (I'm wording that poorly but I hope you get what I mean). On that note, I graduated with a bachelor's in illustration last year, and now I have a graphic design job for a corporate company.

You're my favorite animator/storyteller right now, I look up to you, I pay for your art, I'm pretty sure your art influenced my doodles on my notebooks in middle school without me even realizing it. I just got this job, and I'm so happy about it, but I'm also nervous my personal art is going to slow down. I think about what you said a lot.

I know you haven't had a job outside of your art, but I still would love to hear your advice. Do you have any tips for how to make the best of the situation?

i think it's a great thing to be hired for your illustration work, i'm sure you're making the best of the situation. now you just have to be the one to make sure your personal work doesn't slow down.

dig back to whatever it was that drove you to become an illustrator in the first place. i'm assuming you're still young because you just graduated which i'm also assuming might mean you're not raising kids yet or having to pay for things you can't afford yet. make the time because you may never have it again. like, ever. in your whole life. watch less tv and play fewer video games, whatever you need to do. sorry i'm making assumptions here but you get the idea.

the most scary thing isn't you not finding enough time every day for your own work, but you slowly losing the desire to create your own work at all. so don't let that happen.

Motivation to animate. Did you battle this at one point in your career then overcome it? How did you slay THAT dragon?

it is easily the hardest part of every project. with experience i think i've reached the point where i've come to expect the sheer boredom and grinding of it and i don't feel discouraged as much.

making a movie is incredibly boring. for every flash of fun creativity there are endless hours of slogging and grinding through technical hoops. it's often just connecting the dots, mindless busywork. but fighting through all the boring stuff and returning to the desk every single day is usually the difference between a project existing or not existing. all the fun creative stuff is what attracts people to making movies or music or whatever it is, but the drudgery of the job is often when most of them give up. they don't fail from a lack of creative ideas but from a lack of patience.

world of tomorrow episode two is so beautiful in so many ways. thank you for making it.

there was so much depth in the visuals. everything was eye candy. can you walk us through how you went about creating the worlds and all of the layers involved? the "images of gardens in our heads" was stunning.

thanks! i touched on this briefly somewhere else around here, explaining a cloud tank we built and almost all the other effects came from practical or even live action sources because i'm just not that well versed in 3D animation and i had better results banging elements of shots together from all sorts of different sources rather than building something from the ground up. and from there they were heavily manipulated and composited until it formed something i liked. some shots are so heavy with intentional rendering glitches that i couldn't actually tell you how they were made... often the most interesting things couldn't be reproduced or reverse engineered which reminded me a lot of the weird optical effects and things i used to try on film for stuff like "it's such a beautiful day." sorry this is probably not very helpful since it was more or less "a little bit of everything". but i tried not to storyboard very much in favor of plowing through every shot fresh every day, which is how the first one was made. i tried not to fuss over details until i was able to look at things again from a distance.

Thanks for doing this AMA! I just want to say that It's such a Beautiful Day is one of my favorite films ever. Something about the story just hits home for me.

I've enjoyed your World of Tomorrow films as well.

How did you go about making the dialogue for Emily in the newest film? Was it a different process than before? Did you recycle any unused audio from the first World of Tomorrow?

Also do you plan to make any more World of Tomorrow episode?

my niece was 5 in the newest film and believe it or not she actually sounded quite different than when she was 4, in the first one. not just in the pitch of her voice but a big leap forward in expressiveness.

so using leftover stuff from age 4 for her character in the new one wasn't really an option because it wouldn't match.

i only found the older recordings useful for one thing... (spoiler alert?) .... when the three young emily clones are chatting in the facility, there's a young emily 10 there who's getting updated and says, "do you hear the cars outside..?" that bit was my niece at age 4 again

1) Any unique sources where you found inspiration for World of Tomorrow? (More broadly, where does your inspiration come from?)

2) If Kathleen Kennedy suddenly had a wild streak and gave you a Star Wars film to do anything your heart desired with, what would you do?

Love your work so much Don! Keep it up!

2) nice try, kathleen kennedy

How often do you run your creative ideas by other people in your life before finishing them? I've been conceptualizing my first post-college film and deciding when to ask for feedback from friends and loved ones or if it's a good idea in the first place has been kind of a challenge.

Loved your stuff for like half my life now and you're a big part of why I decided to try to be an animator, thanks for the AMA!

if i run into an issue with timing or have a question about clarity i'll drag my best friend or girlfriend into the room and show them a scene and quiz them, but i try to only do this very rarely. when i'm nearly finished with a project i want the people closest to me to be the first to see it so they can offer me notes then, totally fresh to it. but if you're stuck it's never a bad idea to ask for help. sometimes you're so close to a project you really miss obvious stuff

Hello Don,

Could you share thoughts of your creative process from when you did the simpsons couch gag?

Any plans for future simpsons collaborations or ideas for theme park rides?

i was always sort of weirded out by cartoon time and how that worked. for long-running comic strips too, long before the simpsons. some newspaper comics have been around for half a century. but the characters don't age. how does time work for them? and then the simpsons became like the longest running show on television and i started thinking about it again. bart is supposed to be like 10 or so, but does he have memories from episodes 20 years ago? how is it all reconciled? it makes me really uncomfortable. also, they don't age but they do sort of evolve. they look a lot different now than they did in the late 80s. so that just got me thinking about what if this longest running show just never ends, ever, and all the original talent is long dead and it just keeps on going forever and evolving alongside humanity. (and also what is comedy like in the deep future?)

i'd be happy to do another thing for them but they haven't asked

Hi Don,

I love your work. World of Tomorrow is my favorite world. Will you please make many more?

Thank you, no further questions.

hello and thanks. i've been writing down ideas for a 3rd one but i haven't started writing anything. i'm not ready to commit yet... i'm not sure if it's what i want to do next. i have maybe 1/3 of the story and so far emily is barely involved, which i think is what's most interesting to me right now. this could all change overnight. but the first two shorts mirror each other in such a nice way that if there's going to be more and it's going to stay interesting, we're gonna need to go off into some other directions

hi don!!

even if you don't end up answering all of the questions I just want to say how much your work has meant to me. I must've watched world of tomorrow ep 1 at least 20 times in one week, not counting all of the times I (occasionally forcibly) sat people down to watch it, and I think about it's such a beautiful day and the end of the world a lot.

question: how did you accomplish some of the effects that you pulled off in WoT ep 2? there were some visuals, especially those trees, that just left my jaw on the floor. are you a wizard?

hey, thanks!

so i'd always wanted to make a cloud tank. i grew up in love with ILM and would buy a ticket to any movie that they did the special effects for. and i realized recently how much i miss cloud tanks. these days you have digital matte paintings and digital spaceships and a digital version of just about every other classic special effect - except for cloud tanks, which were always such a unique and incredibly surreal effect (see: "poltergeist," "close encounters" etc)

so anyway while i was working on WOT2 my girlfriend was working with terrence malick doing compositing on "voyage of time" and their crew were doing all sorts of amazing practical effects with planets and giant cloud/ink tanks and we were both sort of fired up enough to make a cloud tank of our own for WOT2. so we did: http://www.bitterfilms.com/cloudtank.jpeg

basically, it's half salt water and half fresh water and where those two divide in the tank is where interesting stuff happens and inks and things spread out.

so most of those big swirly backgrounds and skies in WOT2 are organic, coming from this cloud tank we experimented with... sometimes further messed around with by me digitally.

for anyone who caught the little theatrical tour i was just on, there was a surprise animated intro in the beginning... we dragged the cloud tank back out for that to create this purple nebula thing, along with a bunch of cool model planets.

so anyway 99% of the time the special effects are going to be practical like this or coming from some sort of organic background because honestly it's the only way i know how to do it... have really animated 3D.

Were there any major ideas that were scrapped for It's Such a Beautiful Day?

hmmmmmm not that i can remember, no. there were a few deleted scenes from the first two chapters, i think they can be found in the galleries of the "single" DVDs of those, but nothing real substantial. the last thing you want to do in animation is cut a finished scene because it all takes so much long to make.

i think there was only one deleted scene in all of the third chapter, it's very short, a dream about a strange creature on a beach. because it was cut from the movie before the narration and audio work began, when i put the scene on the "volume 2" DVD in 2012 as a bonus feature i dug up the original script for it and found myself narrating again for the first (and last) time since the movie was finished.

Do It's Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow happen in the same universe? Is this some sort of Hertzfeldt Cinematic Universe? If that's the case, in which phase are we right now?

ok who is good at fan fiction? get to work

wait i didn't even think of this but i mashed up the two for the main menu on the blu-ray. write!

my internet speed doesn't really allow me to watch World of Tomorrow part 2 in one go when i rented it, it stops every minute or so even when i watch at 360p, so i was wondering if you're gonna put it for download at some point?

yes it will be available for download but i'm not sure when. it may be a few more weeks still. we need it to perform well enough before everyone steals it and torrents it. but seriously though don't watch it at 360p

Here's something I was wondering: your work is often sad and tragic, but always seems to have a dash of dark humor peaking through all of it.

Do you see the funny things in life as tragic or is it more the other way around, where you see the humor in the sad things around you?

PS love all your stuff <3

i think the moment you lose your sense of humor in the face of sad things all around you is when you start to lose everything. i've read memoirs by people who spent years in concentration camps but were still able to wake up with a sense of humor about their situation and i think that's beautiful.

Just wanted to say I really appreciate your work and am a huge fan of the craft of animation.

In your opinion, are advancements in computer technology helping or hurting creativity?

helping. they're all just tools, what matters is how you use it.

Are you aiming for haunting and stumbling into hilarious or vice versa?

I'll take my answer off the air.

lately i feel like i'm stumbling everywhere

Will you be lending your voice in any more projects soon? I find just listening to It's Such a Beautiful Day as a relaxing experience.

oh thanks. but i hope not. working with your own voice on a movie is a sort of torture. i could maybe do something for somebody else but i am really happy that so far the only voices we hear in the "world of tomorrow" films are women's.

Hey Don, I was a huge fan of Temporary Anesthetics back in it's day, so much that I have a tattoo of one of the panels from "Wisdom Teeth." Any plans to do short web comics again?

nah i didn't really know what i was doing and i probably still wouldn't. i don't feel real comfortable doing graphic design type stuff or layout. like just having to design a poster for the new movie feels like the biggest most impossible nuisance. i did the "end of the world" comic book and really missed the immediacy of being able to use sound and movement.

hello don! huge fan, enjoyed seeing the rejected video and was destroyed when i watched "everything will be ok"

on to my questions:

-what are your plans after world of tomorrow 2?

-what do you think any artist should remember when it comes to making art?

-how do you come up with your crazy ideas??

thank you for doing this ama, and i hope you're having a nice day today!

-what do you think any artist should remember when it comes to making art?

honesty

Hi Don! Huge fan, just watched WOT episode 2 and it was amazing of course. Very much looking forward to the next one assuming there is one. I have so many questions for you but I will narrow it down to a few.

1. I believe I read in one of the other answers that you recorded Emily Prime's voice by simply recording your niece with your iPad. As an amateur animator, the biggest problem I have is making good voice recordings. I do not own a quality mic, but seeing as how the lines for Emily Prime are pretty good and all you used was an iPad, I just wanted to ask if you had any tips to producing better voice recordings without renting out a recording booth?

2. Do you just let her ramble on about pretty much anything she wants and then build the story and animation around certain chosen audio clips?

3. Do you play video games, and if so, which are your favorites?

• i'm afraid you're just going to have to invest in a quality mic. while i did record winona with an ipad because i had to be unintrusive, that audio was not great quality. i had to do a lot of editing and fancy EQ to get those sessions sounding professional and even then you can still hear background hiss and other problems. but i can usually get away with all that by mixing in all sorts of other weird noises and static and stuff in the soundscapes of these cartoons, to cover it up. movie magic!

• i got a switch but i mainly only play mariokart with it