GNT is a short film that explores contemporary womanhood as it intersects with social media by capturing a snapshot of the dynamic friendship between three friends. Premiered through Sydney Film Festival, it won the 2020 Yoram Gross Award for Best Short Animation. Directed, written and produced by Sara Hirner and Rosemary Vasquez-Brown, the duo have worked together throughout university and hope to continue their vision. I had the pleasure of interviewing them, discussing the medium of animation, their collaboration, inspirations and future plans. The wittiness and charm of their film was only further reflected in their effervescent personalities. Their creativity knows no boundaries and their artistic vision is culturally attuned to their surroundings. You should definitely keep an eye out for future work produced by Sara and Rosemary, for GNT was only a snapshot—the hors d’oeuvre, the sample platter, the entrée, for what’s to come.
Bonnie: I just wanted to congratulate you both on winning the animation award this year! I loved watching it, I watched it like so many times.
Sara and Rosemary: Thank you! Thank you so much!
Rosemary: We love listening and finding out that people actually get it and relate to it and love it as much we do.
Yeah, well talking about relating to it… I know, it’s quite an exaggerated satirical story, but was it a personal one about a personal experience, or? Where did the idea come from?
Sara: Kind of, yeah.
Rosemary: Yeah! Well, I was watching that TV show called Myth and Medicinal. We were listening to all the crazy home remedies people came up with. Oh, it was just really hilarious to hear of all those home remedies. One of them was like, this lady who was using garlic stick up her vagina to, get rid of it (thrush).
Sara: And we were like, just use the Canesten three-day treatment, like, why would you need a home remedy for this?
Rosemary: And we thought that was hilarious in itself. So, yeah, this could be something to base our narrative around. I’ve never had thrush, funnily enough.
Sara: We had a lot of ideas written down at first, and a few that were even more personal, but I think that was the only one that we thought we could do in under five minutes. We knew we probably couldn’t add any more than that, on our own, at least in the time that we had, so that was the one that stuck.
Rosemary: Yeah, we wanted it to stand out as well.
It was really efficient and it was great how you that all in four to five minutes. Well, I’m sure you also draw from a different variety of inspirations, but was there anything else that drove this work or really inspired it?
Sara: We had been developing the characters for a while before – we had made some comics about them and we had actually done a Pitch Bible with them. We had heaps of stories that were based on conversations that we had with friends, or we would eavesdrop on a lot of conversations and then write things down afterwards. We just had an ongoing list of all the people that just said dumb shit that inspired us.
Rosemary: Like one of our main inspirations is just going on Tinder or Hinge and…
Sara: Writing down to the most stupid answers to questions! We were on dating apps almost exclusively for the content.
Good research, only for the research!
Rosemary: I know! Yeah, who needs love?
Sara: We had a few artists as well that inspired us, even our teachers as well. There was a lot of people that we just drew inspiration from, but I think it’s mostly always real life and then we just like to exaggerate it. Even our own friendships and the dynamics that we had experienced or that our friends had experienced with other friends. We thought a lot of that was really funny and…
Rosemary: Raw.
Sara: Relatable and real. So yeah…
Rosemary: We based off that!
You’ve created a whole world because of that continual development. That’s why GNT was already so whole, in the animation. The details! Even the grocery store, I’m like, wow, I want to know more about this grocery store.
Sara: We have dogs Easter-egged everywhere as well. There’s like dogs in every background.
Rosemary: We have so many ideas for other stories to happen in every kind of environment you might see in there. We thought it all out, we know exactly what.
Amazing! I wanted to ask if there was anything else for the world that you’ve both created?
Sara: So much! Oh my God. We created so much background to everything because we didn’t think that we were going to make the film initially. We had been creating things for them for ages and then picked this story. Once we picked the story, we already had, as you say, the grocery store. We already had that setting. We had an initial concept where a lot of it took place in a juice place, but it doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. So many secondary characters that just didn’t make it in unfortunately. We had to cut everyone out, there wasn’t enough space for everyone.
Rosemary: But no, we definitely want to keep developing it and hopefully share all of our ideas because there’s too many, it’s overflowing, and we can’t go into a conversation without vomiting words everywhere about it.
Sara: I hope we have a lot more to do with them. I don’t feel like we’re finished with the characters.
Well, talking about the characters, you said you’ve already developed them initially but what about the actual voice actors themselves? I adored the voices so much and they really elevated the narrative.
Sara: We had some trouble with the voice actors, actually!
Rosemary: Yeah, it was just so hard to find.
Sara: We had our voice actor, Regine, who plays Nikki. We knew what voice we wanted for her; we always had the voice in mind already. She works at an animation studio, around the corner from our university and then someone heard us talking about voice actors and she was like, “You know what, I have someone that could do that voice”. She came in, and she just started speaking to us, and we were like, “No, don’t worry, you are the voice.” She was like, “Oh, do you want to test me?”, and we’re like “No, no. That’s voice the voice that we want”. Tammy was actually from the beginning, we had her as Niamh, she’s one of Rosemary’s friends.
Rosemary: She just has the assertiveness in her voice, she’s clear, and can be quite cutthroat with it.
Sara: And she also got the character. She could have done any of them, and we probably would have been like, “Yeah, do whatever you want”, because we just like her acting ability, but she really got Tammy and we were like, “Okay, this is perfect”. Then, Glen initially actually started off as a man. A male voice playing a female voice, but he couldn’t make it on the day that we had to record it. We were freaking out! And there’s this girl at our university who just happened to be in that day and we were talking and we were like, “You know what, she’s so animated. I wonder if she’d just be up for doing a voice”. And she studied animation! When we asked her, she was just up for it! She turned out to be the main character and she was SO good. It was completely accidental, but she was amazing.
Rosemary: She took it and ran with it and was perfect.
Sara: She started making up her own lines too. The end credits, where they just ramble off in the voiceover, she just did that all herself- it wasn’t even scripted. She just started going off, saying all these things, and we were like, oh my god. It was such a happy accident.
Rosemary: The first line, I think, was scripted as, “lift me up sluts”, and she’s like, “Can I say “thotties?” and I’m like, ” Yeah, you can say thotties, definitely”. She was so good.
Sara: She was just amazing; we could not have picked a better person and we didn’t even know each other very well before that. She was just sitting there and I was like, you know, I’ve heard her talking before and when she talks to her friends, she’s so animated and so sassy.
Rosemary: And yeah, she looks a little bit like Glenn as well.
Sara: Yeah, she has the same hairstyle and one of our animation teachers, he was the French statue.
Rosemary: Oh, and I didn’t even say! Sara is also three people’s voices in the background.
Sara: I’m all the extras, ha ha. A very low budget.
No, that’s great! What about visually? I know you both do art and animation, and I had to look at your Instagram. They’re kind of similar but also different art styles, so how did you meld them together into something more cohesive?
Rosemary: It was so hard. Initially, Sara had designed the characters already for our whole Pitch Bible that we did prior to making the film. And I was like, okay, I’ll do the environment designs and stuff like that. Then, as we were trying to morph the two styles together, it just like wasn’t working. It was a mess, a collage that just didn’t look right. It was just a lot of redrawing them
Sara: It was a lot of iterating.
Rosemary: In each other’s styles until it worked.
Sara: That was probably the hardest part of the whole film, actually, was trying to find a way to mould our two styles together, but in a way so that it didn’t look like a compromise because we still wanted the film to look like it was its own thing. We didn’t want it to look like we had compromised on two styles or someone had drawn the background and someone else had drawn the characters- or something like that. We wanted it to look like its own world. On top of that, we really wanted to animate it a certain way, with a certain brush, so we ended up animating the whole thing in Photoshop, which is like sin. Blasphemy.
Rosemary: Yes, so taboo.
Sara: Yeah, you’re not allowed to do that. But we just really wanted that sort of gritty brush style, even with the backgrounds and everything, we still wanted to keep that style. We’re just like, fuck it. We’re doing it the way that we want to do it and making it look how we want it to look.
I think things like that are excusable when you have a specific vision to execute.
Sara: Yeah!
Rosemary: I couldn’t have made that in a normal animation program. Photoshop was the way to go as disgusted as other animators will be to hear that we did it all on Photoshop.
Sara: We also wanted something that looked a little bit rough, and wasn’t so sleek and so perfect because I think that wouldn’t really have served the story anyway.
Rosemary: We like the comic style as well. We love drawing them in comics. And so like, I think that also carried over a bit into the animation style.
Sara: Rosemary’s incredibly talented. I think once she started doing the patterns, as well, that really brought it together. Rosemary designed a whole lot of patterns for different textures in the background and in the foreground. That just tied it all together after that. We were like, okay, now we know what it’s going to look like.
Amazed by both of your talents and skills. You talked about how, you draw a lot from comics as well. It’s a very graphic animation style and it seems to be just an extension of your artwork style as well. Kind of what I mentioned in the review, Instagram cynical comics. You know those accounts like @filthyratbag or something, it’s very that. Well, what do you like about animation particularly?
Sara: Nothing, haha!
Rosemary: I’ve always loved that. I’m not always satisfied with just an illustration. I want to see it move! I just like animation because it can take it into something else and connect two different illustrations to each other as well.
Sara: Also, for you, your design comes to life so much. You have such strong design anyway, that it makes it really powerful if you can make it an animation. I just like animation because we can get away with a lot more. If we had made that film in live action, we just wouldn’t have been able to show it anywhere. Also, how bizarre we can be and how quickly you can transition between worlds.
Rosemary: I think it’s a forgiving medium.
Sara: That’s almost the best part of it, especially for the stories that we want to tell. It gives us a lot of freedom. But having said that, it’s also extremely disciplined, and both of us struggle with that at times actually. Like your motivation can really wax and wane and then, you know, after a few hours of drawing the same person’s finger over and over, you’re like, okay, I would like to draw something else haha. It’s really rewarding but it takes a lot of time!
Rosemary: Definitely couldn’t have done it alone, because we needed each other’s energy to like, boost the other ones up.
Sara: We always say we have the same energy source and we both just pull from it. Whenever I have like a lot of energy, Rosemary’s like really lethargic and when Rosemary has a lot of energy, I’m really lethargic. We have a good symbiosis in that way.
Rosemary: I’ll call her and then she’ll be like, “Oh my God, I’ve done nothing all day.” And I’m like, “Oh, I filled the whole booklet of drawings.” So, it works!
As if you’re taking shifts!
Sara: Exactly. If you’re doing that all alone, it is really hard because all those times when you’re feeling really down, nothing’s getting done. When you have someone else. It’s like, Okay, well, it’s not dependent on me now. She can carry the weight or I can carry the weight.
Yeah, that’s so true. Or, you could just motivate each other as well.
Sara: Yeah! Or we just have Red Bulls.
Well, I think that’s all but just one last question. I just want to know what goes on in both of your brains because they’re so great. What are some films that are your favourites, or really inspired you, or the one that you always recommend to people?
Sara: Oh my God, don’t get us started. Okay, you go first, the teenage one.
Rosemary: Oh gosh, I love Diary of a Teenage Girl. Just because it’s something that I’ve always wanted to make similar to that. It’s just so beautifully aesthetic and it morphs live action with animation. I just really want to try make something live action and animation eventually. Again, it’s like comic illustration animated and it’s done so beautifully. I adore it.
Sara: For me, I have the worst recommendations. Not the worst, but I like all Tarantino movies and I love mafia or like gangster kind of movies. I love Kill Bill. I love Scarface.
Rosemary: She’s such a weirdo.
Sara: I guess one of the ones that I get inspiration from, a lot of the time, is Virgin Suicides. I feel like since I was a teenager, it’s been a staple movie or aesthetic. It’s the same kind of thing, yeah, where we just always go back to those two movies. Then I’d say probably Isle of Dogs as well, that makes me cry every time I watch it. I reckon that’s my favourite animated. One of them, at least. The animation in that is so beautiful. It’s like, just to look at, is insane. I don’t know how anyone did that. Same as Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s like, how did anyone animate that?
Rosemary: My favourite movie of all time is Moulin Rouge as well. Not that it inspires me. I just do great work when I’m listening to the soundtrack.
Sara: So many short films! I love Sunday lunch. It’s a French one. It’s so good. Oh, my God. Virus Tropical.
Rosemary: We love that. That’s a feature.
Sara: It was just crazy. It’s based on a lady who makes all these comics, as well, her life. Wow, so good!
Rosemary: It is stunning, and the narrative wasn’t even like, crazy stuff happening. It was just a life story told beautifully in animation and it didn’t need anything to make it stand out. It was just the story was lovely.
Sara: That sounded Sander Joon one, I really like Velodrool.
Rosemary: Egg! Sorry we’re naming so many haha.
No, thank you! I’m going to watch them all after.
Sara: Egg is the one to watch! I don’t even know if that’s online yet, but when we saw that we’re both just like, “Oh my God! I can’t believe someone made that!” Everything! The design is so, so immaculate in that movie.
Rosemary: Yeah and the narration over the top is stunning. There’s also one called Pussy and it’s just hilarious. It’s kind of just a girl’s clitoris, personified. It’s adorable. It’s actually the cutest movie, for what is actually about.
Sara: It sounds vulgar and it’s not at all. It’s like so soft and gentle. Just to name a few, haha!
Well, what about animated series?
Sara: I tend to have kind of like, teenage boy taste and animated series. I love South Park, Family Guy and Rick and Morty.
Rosemary: Avatar is always a good go to.
Sara: Big Mouth. The first season of Big Mouth we liked, that was pretty good. Daria!
Rosemary: Angela Anaconda. Fairly Odd Parents. There’s so many.
Sara: We used to watch the live streams the whole day.
Rosemary: Yeah, who would just put that while we were animating, while making the film.
That’s so fun! Well, that’s all, thank you so much for your time and for talking to me.
Sara and Rosemary: No, Thank you. Thank you so much!
GNT
Sydney Film Festival