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 life, early and/or life:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)