Fish, but No Cigar 4:00 digital video 2007
An animated movie about a woman with bigger fish to fry. Literally.
This movie was made in collaboration with Tara White, who I met when she was a student at Penn State. Tara told me that she liked my writing, and would be interested in collaborating on a short animation. I love animation, but have no aptitude for it, so the idea of writing for an animation and helping to make it sounded great. I wrote a couple of short scripts and showed them to Tara, but she wasn't too interested--she pointed out that what I had written so far could easily be live action, and she wanted us to make something that could only be animation.
Fair enough. I looked at Tara's sketchbooks to see what kinds of things she liked to draw, and I saw some nice-looking fish. So I came up with the short story about having bigger fish to fry that turned into the narration for this film. Then Tara moved in, and my house turned into a round-the-clock animation studio for a couple of months, powered by malted milk balls and salami. Another lesson in the value of teaming up with someone with a strong visual imagination. I firmly believe that 1+1 here equaled 3, or at least >2.
