Channel Frederator Blog

Ian Etra’s short film, In-Out is a humorous story told through character animation that seeks to communicate the frustration of a meaningless job – and the joy of transcending it – through the eyes and body language of two mouth-less office mates. Based (loosely) on actual work experience, this is Ian Etra’s recently completed thesis film for NYU’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications. “In-Out” was featured in last year’s “Nextoons: The Nicktoons Film Festival”, and I have recently heard that it will be in this year’s Annecy Film-/ Festival. Congrats Ian!

Here’s what Ian has to say about his film:

“The main inspiration for In-Out is pretty much every job I’ve ever had up until now, and the jobs that seem to preoccupy most other people I know. Not that they’re really all that terrible, but I guess I’ve spent too much time thinking about what it all really means, and from that perspective they all feel pretty much like the jobs in In-Out.

The other main sources of inspiration were Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, to which I’ve lovingly snuck in a reference, the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy, and countless examples of great non-verbal animated story-telling.
The hardest part of making the film was trying to accept the reality that I didn’t have enough time to do it. My two-year Masters program only allowed one semester to complete a thesis project, which is not really enough time for a 3 minute animated short…As a result, I think I was still rendering frames during my thesis defense.”
Melissa