That’s the Breaks

Animated Short Film

My two oldest friends and I made this happen.

We shot a ton of stills in a project building complex in our hometown — Chicago — and, without getting into the details, reconstructed them in a way that is, in retrospect, visually painful. Every frame is a photograph that has been cut apart, recolored, and forced back together: streets posterized into black shapes, a sky repainted flat blue, a police cruiser rendered in the palette of a bruise. The whole thing plays back like a memory doing its best under interrogation.

If you’re looking for a meaning in this piece, don’t hurt yourself. It’s pretty literal.

Curator’s note

This sits on the same film shelf as Michael and the Reservoir title sequence — the era when the studio’s founder was hand-assembling motion out of whatever the camera could carry home. The technique here is the honest ancestor of styles that later got names and plugins: photo-reconstruction animation, done manually, at a scale (“a ton of stills”) that guaranteed the visually painful verdict from the only critics who were there. The title is the review the friends gave reality itself: that’s the breaks.

The manifesto asks for work where a real person made this, on purpose — and for the willingness to fail publicly. Keeping this film in the portfolio, with its own maker’s verdict attached, is both at once. Look directly, even at the early cuts.

Proof: watch it on Vimeo