haha. I struggled to stay afloat for most of my time in Denver, but I did stay very busy being artsy. I would hole up in my basement for months at a time learning stop motion videos and experimenting with different styles of animation. I look back on those years in wonderment. It was a very solitary lifestyle, but I think I needed to go through that awkward chapter in order to make a ton of crap … including Ghost Dogs. I gave up on the idea of moving to Los Angeles a long time ago. It’s weird that I live here now, but I do love it. I’m surrounded by artists and art is all they want to talk about. Haha, it’s great. There’s an obvious optimistic determination and deep self-belief in your work that you’ve carried consistently throughout your career. Can you dive deeper into the importance of this mindset in navigating the path you’ve taken so far? I think it’s a well-known fact that movies and TV shows overall are getting worse and worse. I can say that, right? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a movie in the last decade. A bad movie would ruin my weekend. There’s also just less and less comedies being made and that really bugs me. I haven’t had a good laugh in the theater in years. When I’m making videos, the goal is to make myself laugh. I think that’s where that “optimistic determination” comes from. If it’s making me laugh then I know I’m on the right track. After Ghost Dogs, you created an array of hilarious animated vignettes showcased on Instagram and TikTok like the Scooby Doo Shuffle, Dino Girl, and your various paper mâché head characters like Coupla Boys, giving you a lot of social media traction. Did these projects put you on the radar of these larger networks and collaborators you work with? And did any of them lead the way to the creation of Haha, You Clowns, or did you develop the series in tandem with others? Oh yeah, everything is connected. I remember the exact moment I was sitting on my couch thinking about my career. The film festival run was over and I was back to square one. I had no gigs on the horizon so I just devoted the next two weeks to making a short one minute animation for Instagram. My friends messaged me telling me it was funny so then I made another. It kind of just ramped up from there. It was all very good timing too. Giphy, Bento Box, and Adult Swim started commissioning Instagram artists to make short videos for them and it’s been a terrific little ecosystem for a lot of my animation friends. Their platforms also get more people seeing your stuff, so yeah, one thing led to another. Your brainchildren, the Gabbagooblins, made an extra big splash. How did this wonderfully bizarre Teletubbies offshoot come about? Haha, yes and I really appreciate the piece you published on the Gabbagooblins a while ago. So, after the festival, the Sundance Institute dangled a financing opportunity for another project. My friend JW and I started kicking around a live action horror comedy similar in tone to Ghost Dogs. It was about characters from a weird kids show that crawl out of a TV and chase around a baby. I made these characters out of paper mâché and shot a proof-of-concept video for the pitch. They ultimately passed on the idea, but the video went viral on TikTok and ultimately connected me with Adult Swim which I’m making Haha, You Clowns for!
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