Said Black
Animated short, 2008
- Awards
- Best Artistic Direction and Sound Design, 2009 UCSD Up&Coming Film Festival
- Official selections
- 2010 DisOrient Film Festival of Oregon
- 2010 SoCal Film Festival
"Said Black" is a project that set out to do three things: 1. challenge the conventional assertions of what we consider "military veterans" to be, 2. to demonstrate the necessity for recognizing form as content, and 3. to reaffirm that using animation as an artistic medium is not a choice in genre but rather a choice in form.
The subject of "Said Black" is former USMC Sergeant Sais Black. He is African-American, young, and has plans to open an independent hip-hop record label, qualities one would not generally expect from our culture's typical understanding of a military veteran. At the same time, he has conflicting yet harmoniously co-existing elements in his life: his disdain for what went on during and after the military vs. his respect for the men and women in it, the challenges he faced by being away from his family vs. his love of travel. “Said Black” seeks to show how Sais Black mends these seemingly disharmonious elements of his life together by using a visual fluidity that only animation can properly convey.
"Said Black" was produced at UCSD under a project headed by Tara Knight. It was animated by hand on printer paper with Sharpies in an enclosed room, which was not very good for my health. Since I did not have a lightbox at the time, I used an old piece of Tupperware and a lamp turned on its side. During production, I accidentally got Sharpie marks all over my roommate's dining table. Sorry, Nate.