I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.
Don HertzfeldtBut 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.
Don HertzfeldtI'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.
Don HertzfeldtI'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.
Don HertzfeldtI 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.
Don HertzfeldtI 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.
Don Hertzfeldt