Industry Buzz:
Bernardo Britto’s animated “Yearbook.”
Bernardo Britto may have won the Jury Award at Sundance in January for his wry animation short “Yearbook,” but that doesn’t mean he sees himself as an all-animation kind of guy.
“I would never call myself an animator,” Britto says. “I’m also not that great at drawing, but for me, animation is the fastest, most simple way to get an idea out of my head and onto something that people can watch.”
Part of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Shorts program, opening Friday, Jan. 2, “Yearbook” watches a man compile a list of historical figures aimed at explaining the history of humanity to aliens. Britto came up with the concept at the SXSW Festival during the 2013 premiere of his first short film, “The Places Where We Lived.”
He says, “I was feeling very good about myself until I got this promotional pencil for another movie that said, ‘Everything you do will be forgotten.’ So then I went down this rabbit hole: ‘Nobody’s going to care about my movie 10 years from now.’ ‘Yearbook’ kind of deals with the question, ‘How do I create something new knowing that it won’t have any lasting value?’ ”
Britto used old-fashioned pencil and paper to create drawings that he scanned into a computer and colored with Photoshop. When the film’s handcrafted charms began to generate buzz, Britto switched gears. “I made a very conscious decision to do a live action next, because otherwise I’d be stuck being known only for doing animation,” he says.
In October, Britto directed the feature-length “Jacqueline Argentine,” starring Camille Rutherford (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”). The French actress plays an eccentric hacker. Britto says, “It’s a conspiracy thriller with weird Edward Snowden parallels, but very much in keeping with the tone of my animated shorts.”
As he completes post-production on “Jacqueline Argentine,” Britto points out that he hasn’t abandoned animation altogether. “I wrote a short called ‘Sun Like a Big Dark Animal’ that my friend Ronnie Rivera co-directed. It’s going to play next month at Sundance. I’ll probably always be making animations just because they’re kind of fun.”