PROCESS

Behind the Scenes

director commentary

Hardboiled is a fully stop-motion animated film, painstakingly (some would say painfully) crafted by hand. Building every prop, character, and set before photographing them one frame at a time was the only way to capture the tactile grit that pervades the urban crime genre that the film satirizes.

character creation

In attempting to riff on this particular genre, I wanted to establish a simple construct with the key characters as a classic pairing: something ridiculous but also logical and familiar. Few partnerships endure like ham and egg and with the detectives’ provenance decided, it seemed like a food-based world would be the perfect setting to explore and recontextualize the tropes and stereotypes that audiences crave, no matter how many times they have been served up on the screen.

over 12 years in the making

With financing options limited for independent shorts, the only option was to jump in and start making the film, one scene at a time. While some financial resources through Hornet, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and a crowdfunding campaign brought much needed production money to the film, it was primarily a passion-project that entailed thousands of hours of labor to create. Starting with a concept, a few simple character designs, and perhaps a willfully naive optimism, the journey to completion took well over a decade.