Don Hertzfeldt Quotes
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When you get questions that annoy you the art is answering them differently. If you're bored with it, then everyone will be bored with it.
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It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.
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To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.
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Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it.
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I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's [World Of Tomorrow] sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.
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Traditionally, digital projects, when you project them, they get really washed out. It's complicated stuff with gamma, but basically your blacks get very milky and the colors get very weak, and we made so many different versions of it to just pump more color into it, so it would look just as good in the theater as it does on your screen at home. And color was my constant whine. It needed to be very oversaturated.
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Time travel is a thing. It can be very dangerous, and it's also very - it's an expensive thing to do.
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I think one of the reasons I love science fiction so much is that it's - when it's ideally done right, it's a reflection on ourselves.
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I frequently run into this, where I genuinely feel like - and this is not just my head cold talking right now - I often, and this is going to sound weird, but I often feel like the guy who makes these movies is smarter than me. Smarter than the guy on the phone right now.
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After working so long on something like this, it's great to go out and meet people and see the reactions and remind yourself that, oh, yeah,, I wasn't just working in a cave by myself for no reason...
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So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.
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I have friends and illustrators who can't stand drawing on the Cintiq. [A graphic pad tablet used by digital animators] There's a certain tension and friction when you draw on paper that they miss. The tablet is very slick. It's like drawing on glass. But that didn't bother me at all.
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If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries...simply because they have much less to lose.
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Maybe the most annoying questions is: "Where do you see yourself in so many years?" It's a terrifying answer no matter how you think of it.
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I still have the same outlook on things that I did 10, 20 years ago. As an animator, there’s no career path that you can follow; there’s very few people doing this that you can look to and pinpoint the mistakes. It hasn’t changed since I was little. You have interests and follow them and strange things happen, organically or not.
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I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].
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I think some of this just feels right. You're in the shower and you come up with a sentence and it's beautiful. You don't know how it's going to fit in the film, but you put it in because it feels right. This is a very long way of saying, so much of it is me feeling like I'm catching ideas rather than coming up with ideas. It's very fluid like that.
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But I had never drawn on a tablet before. I've been doing pencil and paper and film for almost 20 years. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to teach myself some digital stuff in advance of a bigger feature project that's coming up, and I took to it really quickly.
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I'm a bit of a weird creature... I'm self taught and went to a regular film school, not art school, and I think it's unusual for somebody to approach animation from that angle. In a sense I've sometimes consclassered myself more of a filmmaker who just happens to animate.
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What's interesting is when you talk about that - "living forever" or as long as you possibly can - what you really want is a continuance of your memories and your experiences. If I said you could live another 200 years, but we'd have to reboot you, that's not attractive. Nobody wants that as much as a continuance of your experience.
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I'm still learning. I've never done a digital project before. And I'm pretty sure I did things to the software that weren't supposed to be done.
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The design is a really flat primary color with all sorts of abstract geometric shapes, just implying something. And then you'd have your characters running from something with guns. It was very expressionistic.
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Usually the more money that something takes to make, the less interesting it's forced to become.
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To me everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process.
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Fighting a cold, but I'm powering through. As they say, there's nothing better for a cold than doing interviews all day.
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Tuesday's coming, did you bring your coat?
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The only purpose of the visuals, in any film, is to serve the story.
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Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.
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It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.
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There's really no reason film and digital can't happily co-exist and benefit from one another. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.
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