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:
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“Somewhere along the line of development we discover who we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)