Early Life
Hertzfeldt was born in Fremont, California where he attended local schools and drew homemade comic books. At 15, he began to teach himself animation with a small video camera. Two of Hertzfeldt's teenage VHS cartoons can be seen on the "Bitter Films: Volume 1" DVD collection.
While at film school he was drawn to animation as it was a less expensive form to work in. He could not afford to buy the multiple rolls of 16mm film required to shoot live action. "I think I've always approached animation from a strange angle, a bit like a regular filmmaker who just happens to animate. Editing, writing, sound, those are the things that usually come first in my head. Animation is often just the busy work I need to get through to connect the dots and tell the story."
Hertzfeldt has never held any job other than creating his animated films, not even in his youth. His earliest video animations found film festival exposure, and in film school at the University of California, Santa Barbara he was able to find international distribution for each of his 16mm student films.
Read more about this topic: Don Hertzfeldt
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)