Dan Hertzfeldt is an animator, artist, writer and independent film maker, born 1st August 1976 in Fremont, California in America. Hertzfeldt was influenced by the film director Steven Spielberg, and he grew up watching everything he did. He loved the way that Spielberg would move the camera in his films. In Hertzfeldt's creative process, he would use memories, sentences he'd heard or dreams, just little things and bring them together to push the creativity and get started.
In 1998 he made Billy's Baloon, a short animated film about a boy getting beaten up brutally by his own baloon, eventually in the film everyone else is getting attacked by their balloons. They get dragged into the sky and then dropped from high up, again and again. This is pretty much all the film is, but it is the dark humour and simplicity that keeps it interesting and entertaining. In his animations, he likes to multiply things intensely throughout the film, like people and their activities. After a while you will see crowds of people doing something, whereas at the start you would only see one person doing it. The story lines in the animations like this are so simple and are almost irrelevant, but with everything else it makes simplicity the theme. Even the drawings aren't detailed, with the characters mainly having stick legs and arms, and their bodies look like sacks. With all of this, it makes it easy to watch and simply enjoyable, and the theme is one that doesn't need to make any more sense or look any different. His work includes a lot of dark humour, which probably helps his animations with their bluntly humorous meanings. He also created The Meaning of Life in 2005, which shows evolution, in a more odd and humorous way, again with things multiplying extremely throughout its duration.
In 1998 he made Billy's Baloon, a short animated film about a boy getting beaten up brutally by his own baloon, eventually in the film everyone else is getting attacked by their balloons. They get dragged into the sky and then dropped from high up, again and again. This is pretty much all the film is, but it is the dark humour and simplicity that keeps it interesting and entertaining. In his animations, he likes to multiply things intensely throughout the film, like people and their activities. After a while you will see crowds of people doing something, whereas at the start you would only see one person doing it. The story lines in the animations like this are so simple and are almost irrelevant, but with everything else it makes simplicity the theme. Even the drawings aren't detailed, with the characters mainly having stick legs and arms, and their bodies look like sacks. With all of this, it makes it easy to watch and simply enjoyable, and the theme is one that doesn't need to make any more sense or look any different. His work includes a lot of dark humour, which probably helps his animations with their bluntly humorous meanings. He also created The Meaning of Life in 2005, which shows evolution, in a more odd and humorous way, again with things multiplying extremely throughout its duration.
Hertzfeldt has had some of his films in festivals, and has even made a "couch gag" for The Simpsons in his own style that appeared on an episode. The work he does is so basic, simple and doesn't even really have to make any sense whatsoever, it is the humour and satisfying simplicity that makes his work fun to watch.
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