I just posted the Rooftop Signal Film to my animation page. It was made for this summer’s Rooftop Films festival here in New York. It’s Flash.
This project took a while to put together. Don’t they all? Mark Rosenberg, one of the people in charge at Rooftop, has been very supportive ever since he included my student film, “Mister Smile”, in a rooftop screening years back. A few years later he included “Moonraker” in Rooftop and asked me to make a signal film for the festival. Maybe he’d seen the Ottawa Signal Film I’d worked on with Will.
Signal films have always been one of my favorite kinds of cartoons. There’s an automatic cut-off of about a minute, so although there’s usually a wide range of creative freedom, the time limit keeps crazy ideas under control. That keeps them in the realm of “projects you can do without quitting your day job.”
Well, those are the technical reasons, but the thing that gets me excited about working on a signal film is the thought of making something that has giddy & positive energy. It’s the sort of feeling I get when the lights go down at the start of a screening. No tragedy.
Anyways, I had started on a signal film for Rooftop in the spring of 2007, but we ran into a bunch of problems. I was starting to work on the “Upstate Four” pilot with Will, so free time was pretty sparse. Also, Mark and I had some different opinions on how the film should end up. I think it boiled down to Mark having some clear ideas on what should happen, while I wanted to make the whole thing up as I went along. It was shelved after a few months.
This spring, Mark got in touch with me and asked me to finish up the film. He said it would work fine, just a couple shots needed to be finished up. I thought that sounded good, but when I looked at the year-old work, I just wanted to re-do the whole thing. I’d made “Upstate Four” and done a year of character design for “Superjail!” in the meantime, and my drawing style had changed.
After off-and-on evenings over about two months, I threw out everything from the previous attempt and made a brand-new film. I think I finished it up a few days before the first screening of this summer’s Rooftop. I was lucky enough to have access to some nice cintiqs at Augenblick Studios, as well as SuperJail interns Jake Armstrong, Kat Morris and Aleth Romanillos – without whom the film would not have been finished.
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