Michael
Vintage Animated Film, 2003
- Role
- Director & animator
- Target
- A finished :30 animated short as a freshman-year final — script, recorded audio, and every frame drawn
- Constraints
- 2003 · freshman year · a true story and a real dorm building · 900 frames, hand-animated, on a student's schedule
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye — direction and animation; Katie — narration; Professor Matt Sheridan — the class that made it possible
- Time-to-dispatch
- Delivered as the Animation 101 final, 2003; published to Vimeo in 2009 and live ever since
- Result
- A completed :30 animated short — Michael on Vimeo — and the first finished film on the studio's shelf
- Principal
- NYU Tisch School of the Arts — Animation 101 (self-directed film)
This was my freshman year final project for animation 101 at NYU Tisch Film & TV. Professor Matt Sheridan made that class a priceless introduction to this mysterious and timeless artform. Thank you Matt.
My first residence in NYC was University Hall at Union Square. Anyone who is familiar with that building will receive special pleasure from this piece, as it takes place there.
It’s a true story, narrated by Katie, who really did torment my roommate Troy by slamming the door of the heating unit after enchanting him with tales of the starving little person residing therein. And we came up with this :30 script that takes it a little beyond reality, recorded the audio and the rest is 900 frames of animation.
RUNTIME 0:30 · 900 FRAMES · HAND-ANIMATED
LOCATION: UNIVERSITY HALL, UNION SQUARE, NYC
SOURCE: A TRUE STORY, LIGHTLY EXCEEDED
NARRATION: KATIE · VICTIM: TROY · ANTAGONIST: A HEATING UNIT
COURSE: ANIMATION 101 · PROF. MATT SHERIDAN
Nine hundred frames of a dormitory legend
Thirty seconds is a merciless length. It is long enough that the audience commits and short enough that any slack is visible from orbit — which is exactly why it is what a first animation class assigns. The arithmetic is the lesson: nine hundred drawings, one voice track recorded before a single frame existed, and no way to fix a pacing mistake except to draw the fix.
The subject helped. A real roommate, a real radiator, a real story about a starving little person living inside it — a legend a person invented to frighten someone she liked. The film does not improve the story. It just takes it a little beyond reality, which is the only license animation asks for.
This is the first finished film on the studio’s shelf, and its method — take a true thing from the room you actually live in, then push it one notch past what the room can hold — runs straight into That’s the Breaks and the Reservoir title sequence the following year.
A real person made this, on purpose — the manifesto’s closing promise, and a fair description of a freshman spending nine hundred drawings on a joke about a radiator. Courage is creative muscle; this is the first set of reps, and the studio kept the tape.
Directed & animated by Nick Charney Kaye.
Proof: watch it on Vimeo — online since 2009.
