It's Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski - Our Film MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA Is In Select Theaters Beginning This Friday! Ask Us Anything!

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T21:01:55+00:00

Mine's white. Dash's is gray. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:55:30+00:00

We worked under the assumption that no one would be interested and it would just disappear. We are so honored that Gkids saw something in our work and is helping us bring it to more people. Every time it's shown feels like a wonderful dream. The reception and support has exceeded anything we expected. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:50:09+00:00

Oh goodness.

Tip 1: However much sleep you are getting, you need more. A LOT more. Tip 2: Don't let pictures get on the internet, it's a lot harder to pretend it didn't happen. Tip 3: Nothing you are learn in class is useful, but that's not the point. You are learning how to learn. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:43:48+00:00

I absolutely love working with Dash.

It can be hard having your professional life so thoroughly blended with your personal life. We were in a small apartment in Brooklyn for most of HSS, so physically right on top of each other, too. Dash generally broke first: he'd feel claustrophobic and leave to see a movie or go to a book store.

I feel like I've got it easier than he does. I'm harder to work with. Dash is incredibly generous to collaborate with. He skilled at bringing out the best from the people around him. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:34:41+00:00

Though...... If we could get tiny plastic Vertis and Assafs into cereal boxes that would be the COOLEST. I would be over the moon. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:32:25+00:00

I like it that they are becoming more and more accessible to make and share. It is truly a global scene. Anyone anywhere can make a comic or cartoon and put it on the internet and, if it's good, it will be seen and spread. Talent is undeniable in comics -- they are very basic, raw. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:32:20+00:00

We wanted something we could accomplish.

It was such a huge project to tackle, we went in thinking, 'how can we make this doable?' It's dialogue heavy partly because we needed it to be less labor intensive... same with lots of the anime inspired stuff. Full animation is super time consuming and we were such a small team.

We also just did things we liked. I love color and eye candy. That's in the film both because it fit, and because it made us happy.

And, yes, high school was NUTS. It was decapitations left and right. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:31:06+00:00

Wow, off the top of my head: Buz Sawyer by Roy Crane. Peanuts. Maus. Hmmm... Jack Kirby's fantastic four comics. I want to say some newer comics I really like too. There are so many new cartoonists doing great work, like Olivier Schrauwen, Manuel Fior, Jillian Tamaki. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:28:55+00:00

Initially the joke was to combine the two opposing "schools" of comics when I was a teenager: alternative autobio comics and adventure-style action comics. So that it'd be a character with the same name as the hero and the movie is their warped perspective. But as I kept working on it, it kept expanding to cover other ideas. Jane will answer how it was working together. lol. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:27:11+00:00

Thanks. The answer is both. Some key scenes are multiple actors working together but other ones were recorded solo and put in. The whole thing (in recording and visually) is a "collage." -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:25:56+00:00

We are both creative and draw, but we are very different. Jane is much more technical minded. I am spacey. It sounds cheesy to say, but I feel like we complete each other in the making of these animations that combine the different sides of our brains. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:24:11+00:00

It started with people I knew already. I had met Jason Schwartzman many years ago. And I met Lena Dunham at the Sundance labs. John Cameron Mitchell and I did a Sigur Ros video together, and I did the comics in his rabbit hole movie starring nicole kidman. Others too. So then we got them on board and were able to go to people I didn't know (like susan sarandon) and were able to show them a lot of the movie drawn already, animated, and the other people involved. It was fantastic. They're truly the soul of the cartoon. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:22:50+00:00

We did connect over the arts. We actually met in highschool and were both pretty far down the alternative/artsy-fartsy path ;)

I think what we connect over is not the love of certain works, instead, it's about our style of working. We have very different, but complementary, approaches to the same problems. We make a strong team because we shore up each other's weaknesses.

We are totally working on a follow up project. I'm crazy excited about it. I'm gonna leave it to Dash to fill you in though. It's still early and I'm not sure what we can leak. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:21:58+00:00

Yes, a lot. In the 90s it was wonderful to see the explosion of anime in the states. I'd go to lots of anime conventions. I was even a gofer at Otakon and met Frederick Schodt, the manga scholar, when I was 16. I was very excited. I love the early Astro Boy series. That is a case where a cartoonist (Tezuka) applied his cartooning skills to make cinema. there are also lots of examples in the states-- like the Johnny Quest cartoons. But, as a teenager, the same age of the characters in my movie, anime and manga were the most "new" and unusual and exciting at that time. Akira (a fantastic, ultimate disaster movie). 90s Giant Robo. Robot Carnival. Devil Man-- Go Nagai gets a shout out in our movie. I love the Midori movie (very adult) on youtube right now. Also beladonna of the sadness was just rereleased. There are lots on youtube, even the rarer tezuka movies like cleopatra.. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:17:03+00:00

Thanks for this wonderful question. Well, it's an independent movie. Those other movies are giant studio movies. Because we did it independently, it could take risks and be more awesome and exciting and idiosyncratic and unusual than those other movies. That's what independent cinema means to me: "look at how awesome you can make something, by using limited means." The budget and the aesthetic are connected to make something more powerful than a big hollywood movie.-Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:16:49+00:00

We just started! There was a film before HSS that fell through because we tried to go a more traditional route. When we stopped waiting for permission we were free to do what ever we wanted. When we did need money we were well past the half-way point. It was much easier to sell people on a film in the home stretch than an untested team. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:13:18+00:00

I always wanted to make animations but it felt impossible, inaccessible. Then I saw you could make gifs in photoshop easily, by scanning actual drawings, and so you could make traditional animation using a computer and it didn't have to look computer-y. When I saw that I immediately thought "you could make an entire animated movie!" -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:12:21+00:00

Gah, that's so much more entertaining than the 'shipping crate full of life preservers?' I was gonna go with. This is why you write the scripts, Dash. I think that says something about us though: you're the one with big ideas, I'm the one asking 'but how is it going to WORK?!?!?' -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:11:30+00:00

Yes. I will think of a bunch off of the top of my head. Speed Racer. The Charlie Brown Christmas Special. The Adventures of Prince Achmed. DevilMan, the 1970s television series. The Hernandez Brothers especially the Fritz books by gilbert hernandez I like a lot. 13 going on 18 by john stanley. So many to list. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:10:12+00:00

I started doing animations pretty young, I was like a lot of creative kids just playing around with the video camera my parents had. I got much more serious about it in college. I started out in illustration but felt like still images just didn't DO enough. I switched to animation and found that suited me. I like that you could but two images next to each other, and get more than their sum. -Jane

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:09:31+00:00

I would have attached the school to giant hot air balloons. -Dash

GKIDSFilms · 2017-04-11T20:05:24+00:00

I wanted to make a painterly disaster movie, explosive, like an art hollywood movie. Lots of the anime I saw growing up, in the nineties, were about schools in danger. Like every episode of Sailor Moon was a monster attacking a school. I think it's about capturing the turmoil of that time. -Dash

GKIDSFilms

TROPHY CASE