CBTV Student Fest 6: Slim Picking Fat Chances

Slim Pickings Fat Chances is a student film by David de Rooij and Jelle Brunt from the Willem de Kooning Academy in the Netherlands. We’ve already written about this film on the Brew and we couldn’t say enough good things about it. Lots of student films pay homage to Tex Avery and Looney Tunes shorts but few get it as right as Jelle and David have in Slim Pickings. This film is good, funny and unpretentious cartooning at its best.

Co-director David de Rooij shared some details with us about the filmmaking process and will answer questions in the comments:

I teamed up with Jelle so we could make a bigger and better graduation film than we had seen before from our school. Jelle also had a funny idea for a short cartoon, so I convinced him that we should work together. Ultimately the initial idea was thrown out because it got too complicated and we decided to start with a simple idea, like many of the classic cartoons that we love. We wanted to make our own classic cartoon, so we watched and analyzed a lot of Looney Tunes and Tex Avery cartoons. Nowadays you don’t see a lot of cartoons anymore that are made in a traditional way, there is a lot of tweening going on. Although we didn’t make this cartoon on paper. we used the computer to work in a traditional way.

Almost every aspect of the cartoon we made together: We brainstormed to come up with a funny story, we both did character designs and redesigned each others’ designs, we both animated, did clean-up, and colored. We cleaned up each others’ animation to blend our styles even more. Only the backgrounds Jelle did all by himself because he’s a lot better than I am.

Currently we have sent and are still sending our cartoon to many festivals all over the world. The main reason is to be seen by a lot of people and hopefully it allows us the opportunity to make more of these films.

Official film website: SlimPickings.nl
Filmmaker website: Jelle Brunt
Filmmaker website: David de Rooij