WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:02.459 --> 00:00:07.340 A while ago I was poking around Netflix and I found this short, 17 minute animation called 00:00:07.340 --> 00:00:11.880 World of Tomorrow, which I watched and then felt depressed and horrified for the next 00:00:11.880 --> 00:00:12.880 two days. 00:00:12.880 --> 00:00:17.099 I highly recommend it but because that film is newer and hard to get a hold of, instead 00:00:17.099 --> 00:00:20.980 we are going to take a look at another cartoon by the same animator, Don Hertzfeldt. 00:00:20.980 --> 00:00:23.279 It’s called Rejected. 00:00:23.279 --> 00:00:27.880 The only official upload has text descriptions on top of it, so if you’d like to experience 00:00:27.880 --> 00:00:31.189 the movie without that you can easily find a clean one by searching. 00:00:31.189 --> 00:00:33.070 It’s nine minutes long. 00:00:33.070 --> 00:00:38.780 Bear in mind as you watch this that it won 27 awards when it came out in the year 2000. 00:00:38.780 --> 00:00:40.989 This is going to be my first time seeing it as well. 00:00:40.989 --> 00:00:46.789 Even though I’ve seen plenty of parodies I never watched the original, so here we go. 00:00:46.789 --> 00:00:50.940 Well, there you have it. 00:00:50.940 --> 00:00:54.699 The source of all the internet memes for the past 17 years. 00:00:54.699 --> 00:00:59.159 The point of the film doesn’t become evident until 7 minutes in, where the text introduces 00:00:59.159 --> 00:01:04.809 creative burnout, and the whole imagined reality suffers from the artist’s mental breakdown. 00:01:04.809 --> 00:01:09.860 The text on screen about Don Hertzfeldt producing commercial work is not true (it’s just a 00:01:09.860 --> 00:01:14.221 tool for the purposes of the animation) but he has had plenty of companies ask him to 00:01:14.221 --> 00:01:19.310 do commercials. 00:01:19.310 --> 00:01:25.460 Rejected is the result of his temptation to say yes to those companies, produce the worst 00:01:25.460 --> 00:01:29.760 commercials possible, take the money and run, and see if the commercials ever became public. 00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:33.430 That’s the story of what is going on inside the animation. 00:01:33.430 --> 00:01:38.450 It came at a time when nobody was making these kinds of senseless short clips. 00:01:38.450 --> 00:01:43.840 The whole idea was revolutionary and inspired things you may be a little more familiar with, 00:01:43.840 --> 00:01:44.840 like asdfmovie. 00:01:44.840 --> 00:01:48.149 So let’s talk about how Rejected is animated. 00:01:48.149 --> 00:01:52.870 It would be extremely easy to make on a computer these days, at least up until the end which 00:01:52.870 --> 00:01:55.109 would require some more planning and thought. 00:01:55.109 --> 00:02:00.189 Hertzfeldt drew Rejected by hand on hole punched animation paper, which you can fit onto a 00:02:00.189 --> 00:02:04.229 peg bar like this. 00:02:04.229 --> 00:02:08.259 If you shine a light underneath you can see the previous drawings, which lets you trace 00:02:08.259 --> 00:02:10.220 it to create the next frame. 00:02:10.220 --> 00:02:14.360 That is how you achieve this wobbly look - redraw the first drawing three or four times and 00:02:14.360 --> 00:02:15.360 loop it. 00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:19.520 The few places where color exists in the animation are also colored by hand. 00:02:19.520 --> 00:02:24.110 Hertzfeldt left the imperfections caused by sloppily coloring with a red marker in. 00:02:24.110 --> 00:02:29.780 It gives the blood more texture than the clean and solid banana yellow. 00:02:29.780 --> 00:02:33.940 The parts with wrinkled paper and turning pages are also made by hand. 00:02:33.940 --> 00:02:36.280 This is an actual piece of wrinkled paper. 00:02:36.280 --> 00:02:39.480 This is a drawing that is wrinkled. 00:02:39.480 --> 00:02:41.600 Now for the interesting part. 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:46.160 If you aren’t scanning these drawings into a computer, how do you get them into a movie? 00:02:46.160 --> 00:02:48.560 Well, you take pictures with a camera. 00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:53.450 The camera is mounted on a post that can move up and down for zooming, and it’s pointed 00:02:53.450 --> 00:02:56.820 at a platform where each animation cel goes. 00:02:56.820 --> 00:02:59.950 The platform can also move for panning. 00:02:59.950 --> 00:03:05.580 The setup is called an animation camera stand, or sometimes a rostrum camera or animation 00:03:05.580 --> 00:03:06.580 rostrum. 00:03:06.580 --> 00:03:07.580 The camera itself must have a frame counter so the camera operator knows which animation 00:03:07.580 --> 00:03:10.730 frame they are working with, even if they move back or forward in the project. 00:03:10.730 --> 00:03:11.740 The camera shutter has to work independently from recording. 00:03:11.740 --> 00:03:12.740 This way you can take very long exposures to make blurs, transitions, and other effects. 00:03:12.740 --> 00:03:16.900 All of the effects at the end of Rejected are the result of messing with the camera 00:03:16.900 --> 00:03:17.900 setup. 00:03:17.900 --> 00:03:22.810 Take this folded paper and expose it for more than one frame, sliding the paper around. 00:03:22.810 --> 00:03:26.610 It becomes blurry and multiplied. 00:03:26.610 --> 00:03:31.430 A shot like this rabbit guy could be drawn on wrinkled paper, or drawn on a transparent 00:03:31.430 --> 00:03:33.960 sheet stacked on top of wrinkled paper. 00:03:33.960 --> 00:03:42.181 In a couple of places you can see the bottom of the piece of paper, and the hole punch 00:03:42.181 --> 00:03:44.880 for the peg bar. 00:03:44.880 --> 00:03:49.640 Camera stands are complex and scary looking to artists who’ve only ever dealt with digital 00:03:49.640 --> 00:03:55.910 mediums, but this sort of loony setup was key to most animations for almost 100 years. 00:03:55.910 --> 00:04:01.330 What you had to do to animate something in the 1800s and 1900s is a future episode. 00:04:01.330 --> 00:04:02.920 Or a few. 00:04:02.920 --> 00:04:03.920 Heh. 00:04:03.920 --> 00:04:04.920 Hm. 00:04:04.920 --> 00:04:07.760 I just noticed you can get World of Tomorrow on Vimeo. 00:04:07.760 --> 00:04:08.760 Well. 00:04:08.760 --> 00:04:09.200 Shoot.