Julian Glander is a 3D computer animator from Pittsburg who has just completed his first feature film, “Boys Go to Jupiter”, which had its premiere at The 2024 Tribeca Film Festival.
In conversation with Doug Vitarelli
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for reaching out and then following up. We’ve been spread very thin this year working on this movie and a lot of stuff has been just whizzing by me.
So I just have to thank Matthias for connecting us. Do you call him TraceLoops?
I call him Matthias, but I do think of him as TraceLoops. He’s the best. We go all the way back to when we were both kind of starting to do this stuff during the good old days of Tumblr and the animation GIF culture that brought us both to animation.
So how’d you get started with animation? I read that you’re mostly self-taught.
I went to school for creative writing and I started doing animation after school. I was working at an ad agency and living in New York and just trying a lot of different things. I was playing in bands, trying to write a novel and doing odd jobs and kind of just slipped into animation.
During that time period, 2012 to 2015, I was trying to be an illustrator and in that moment, illustration was changing a lot and animation was becoming a part of it. And, you know, those two worlds used to be somewhat separate. Basically I started a Tumblr account where I was sharing memes and stuff and then I started adding some wiggle animation to that and a year later it became 15 second animations. Maybe another year later, it was music videos and then over the course of 10 years it went from that to short films to TV episodes to where we are now, which is a 87-minute feature film
What kind of band? Where’d you play?
I played guitar and sand. It was a post-punky new, wavy kind of band.
We played around New York for less than a year. Trying to be a musician is brutal. You just take a beating every day. So after playing shows I was happy to just sit at the computer for the rest of my life.
You live somewhere in Pennsylvania?
I’m out here in Pittsburgh.
So you went to college for creative writing and then you moved to New York to be a writer?
I just did it. Graduated school in Boston and basically they just put you on a bus and say you live in New York now. It was the madman era and I wanted to work in advertising. I worked at agencies for a couple years. I was working at this place which was basically a guy that tried to start an ad agency out of his apartment.
A lot of what I did was walk his dog, move his car for alternate side parking. It was not the industry for me but it’s where I kind of learned what an art director was and then what an illustrator was and it’s even where I first met a couple animators.
I’ve got your website up now and you’ve all these tabs: animation, illustration, games, comics, GIFs, tunes and I like the fact you have plants, dogs, clouds and blobs.
When I was talking to Matthias, what I thought was really interesting was that he’s an artist but does animation and I would say the same thing about you. Except that he’s not character based like a lot of us. And you’re character based but not sophisticated, you have an outsider art fair type of vibe to me.
Can you tell us the journey of how you create all this amazing work?
Well I’ll sort of go a little sideways on this, go back to what you said, which is calling it sort of outside. I love that. I definitely think when you look at a lot of 3D artists and really the 3D art community and culture as it is right now, there’s a big emphasis on technical mastery. Like getting really good at creatures and making spaceships and really detailed stuff. But for me, I feel like once I had a grip on it, it was more about developing a visual language that I could do a lot of different things with so I’m not conscious of a Julian Glander style when I’m working.
It’s the same way that someone who’s writing a novel is not conscious that they’re working in English, you know, that stuff is sort of so background for me. Where I kind of instinctively know what colors I want to look at and how I want things set up. And then from there it’s the jumping off point where I can focus on different mediums and that’s what’s so juicy to me.
So having just finished making a video game, I take from that and apply it to a short film or, Comics, illustration, poster design and music. And how can I put all of that together in this 90-minute thing.
So you lived in New York for how many years-ish?
On and off, like a decade.
And why are you from Pennsylvania? Why did you move there?
I just love it. I was visiting a friend here and just let me give my little Pittsburgh pitch, which is: it’s a great city to be an artist.
It’s very cheap. you’re not drowning in distractions, which was always my problem in New York because going out every night and spending a lot of money and also spending just a lot of energy.
For somebody who has a contained practice or works online it’s the perfect place to live because there’s an artistic community here, and it’s beautiful. When people think of Pittsburgh they think of smokestacks but it’s actually a very green city and I have met so many great artist friends. I’m in a subsidized artist studio right now.
I think I was basically just looking to get out of New York. It was sort of a darts on the map sort of thing a few years ago and it’s worked out really well.
I think you use Maya but there’s a good chance to use Blender.
I use Blender.
I know they made a huge leap forward a few years ago with version 3.
I really started using Blender as my full-time tool more than 10 years ago. And I’m one of these old heads who actually misses when Blender kind of sucked. When I started production on Boys go to Jupiter in 2022 I had to basically lock into a certain version.
It’s actually like mind-blowing. Every couple of months it seems there’s just a completely game changing update on it. It’s a community that has just spiraled into something massive. Obviously, you’re familiar with the movie Flow, which is now like taking over the world. That’s also a blender movie.
It’s amazing.
So I don’t have anything really to add to the Blender discourse. Everyone knows it’s awesome. I’m ride or die for Blender.
You stopped updating and just used your tools to the best of their ability.
I think going for that $100 million big studio perfection is a losing game because there’s always going to be somebody who has more money, more resources and a bigger team than you.
And also it’s like all that stuff looks like what the AI generated stuff looks like now. So you know, doing things that are detailed and photorealistic, it’s not even impressive to anyone anymore. I really was thinking about this a lot about the different pipelines that are available for an animated feature because what I kept seeing, when I went to festivals, was the big studio. Huge budget movies that were made with a very industrial pipeline. Specialist’s teams. Tons of resources. You know, one person pencils the storyboards and another person colors in the storyboards. One person lights, the hair, etc.
And then on the complete other end, none of the short films that I saw and love were like that at all. They were all really scrappy and personal and made with one person or a small team over however long it took with no money.
And I thought there has to be something in the middle. There has to be some way for these two philosophies to meet. Why can’t we just do what we’re doing for our short films? And because there was never going to be a version of this movie that got made for 10 million dollars. There’s too many things in it that are weird or not appealing to a big family audience.
Some of this is artistic stuff and some of this was practical stuff where it’s just about seeing things through and getting them done.
I remember that Matthias said that early on he realized he didn’t want to go into that sort of studio production because he would have less control over it.
So it sounds like one of the reasons you guys kind of bonded was that you have a very similar ethos on production and that is having more control, more of a voice.
Yeah, with Matthias, what I really see with his videos of him making his work is that he really loves The sort of hypnotic Zen-like repetitious elements of the animation process.
He really likes getting in that flow of production and for me there’s something in that for sure where it’s like, I think coming from creative writing, it’s like the intimacy of being kind of the only person working on something. It’s really alluring to me.
What I love is that sort of three in the morning, nobody knows what I’m working on. Nobody even knows that this movie is being made. It’s like, well, what if a movie could be like a novel where one person just chipped away at it and put in every single detail? Exactly how they wanted to? I don’t know if it’s freedom or control or what but it’s when I’m absolutely the happiest. When it’s just me, and there’s no art director over my shoulder, but also nobody that I’m directing. Where I’m just kind of one with the work.
Any influences? I noticed, there was an artist that seems to be a direct influence of yours, David OReilly.
It’s funny. When I started doing animation, everyone kept pointing me to David OReilly. I haven’t thought about him in a while. He was, he was sort of a huge figure on the internet in the 2010s for sure.
Okay. So you didn’t say, “I want to be like him”, but you just sort of happened to be like him, I guess, because you took a similar path of creating your own work. And also a Lo-Fi kind of feel.
I definitely see the connect. I think we’re definitely coming from the same place. I met him a few times, very nice guy. When I was starting my career, the people I wanted to be like, it was not necessarily people who were visually similar or even doing the same thing but I really liked.
Like Miranda July, Spike Jones, Mark Mothersbaugh. People who could really just bounce around and maybe had a core project, but then didn’t feel bound to it at all. Like how Dave Eggers was someone who I just loved. I love the idea of, I’m gonna write a novel now and then I’m going to do a movie next and etc, etc.
I actually, I reached out to Miranda July. I wanted her to do a voice in the movie and she ended up not being able to do it but she gave me notes on the script that I used, which I love. So she has a special thanks for the movie.
I noticed that you had some big names. How did you get the voice acting? And financing? But I guess it starts with the story. Where did the story come from?
The financing was easy because there was none. We just did it really Scrappy. Everyone was kind of doing me a massive favor on this. My best friend, she came on as my producer and basically that just meant anything that needed to be done, she did.
So just pick one person from the cast to pick Sarah Sherman, because you mentioned her. The story was just that we had been friends on Twitter for a while. We had both worked for this worker owned Socialist streaming service called MEANS TV so I had known her work before SNL and I think she had seen a couple posters I did for them. And I just basically, I messaged her and said, “Will you come into the booth for an hour and do a role in the movie?” She was like, “Yep, sure.” She obviously has an immense unbelievable level of energy because she will do SNL, and then go off and do two more shows in Brooklyn, the same night.
But she’s the real deal and like that for most of the cast, mostly people that I had some really nebulous connection to and I begged them to do it and tried to make it as easy as possible for them.
It’s amazing how generous other creatives are.
That was actually one of my biggest takeaways from the whole process was almost everybody. who did voice acting on it, really showed up. Jack (Corbett) who plays the main character, I sent him the script a week before we recorded and he came in with notes on everything, printed the script, had character notes on everything. I had asked him not to do that because I was feeling so guilty about even making people come in for SAG-AFTRA. JaneaneGarofalo, same thing. She had notes and so does not have to be that person. Where she is with her career is a legend, she really could have phoned it in but nobody did. And my takeaway is when I start taking on client work again, I want to be like that for my clients. I want to be able to have enthusiasm, show up early, not drag my feet through things and be excited and also take direction.
Because as a controlling person, I could not sit in a booth and have someone tell me to do something over and over the way these voice actors do. I mean that is really a skill.
How long did the whole movie take?
Four years.
A lot of it was just on the script. I’d go after dinner and write for basically two hours every night and could have done that forever because I just love doing it.
At some point I said, “Okay, it’s time to make the movie” and we recorded all the actors in summer of 2023 and then the movie was done for Tribeca, summer of 2024. So just a year of really intense production.
Wow, that’s amazing. Did you do client work at that time or did you just concentrate on the movie for a whole year?
I wanted to concentrate on the movie for a year but I ran out of money so I worked on the book (I Want To Be A Vase) with Julio (Torres) while I was writing the script and he basically had to do the movie because it would have made it really awkward if he had said, no.
I took a break for a month to do a project for a TV network that has not been announced. It’ll come out at some point, but I don’t want to get in trouble. Probably the biggest expense was not working for a year.
And so my wife was really supportive there. She was working up off of this grant called Creatives Rebuild New York, so we had this universal and basic income for artists which was incredible.
You married an artist. Do you have kids?
I just had a baby girl. Four months ago.
Congratulations! I have two sons, 24 and 20.
(This section, while not necessary, has not been edited out because of someone’s vanity)
No. How old are you?
59.
You’re not 50 fucking nine.
Yeah. Yeah, I am.
Wow. keep doing whatever you’re doing.
Thank you.
(now back to why we’re all here…)
I have to say this is the number one responsibility. I don’t really care about anything anymore.
I’m very happy you finished this before you had a baby.
Well, it was a big motivator. If I don’t do this movie before we have a baby I’m never gonna do it. My wife was, I think, six months pregnant at the premiere. We got it in there just in time.
Do you have any sort of distribution deal?
Kind of, we’re working it out. Basically I’m hoping to get it in theaters this summer. It’s been more of an eye-opening process than I thought it would be. I thought it would be very easy to just make it and that it would be on every movie screen in the world and I’d get a billion dollars.
But in the meantime, it’s just festival after festival. We had our little break for the holidays and now I think it’s in a different city or a different country every weekend through the spring, and that’ll probably keep going for an entire year, which is awesome.
I can’t go to all of them because I want to be home with the baby. But when they’re showing them, I’m like, sitting there on Letterboxd because it’s 9:45 in Portland right now, they just finished the movie and I’m gonna refresh and see if anyone logged it, which is so toxic.
Okay. I told you my age. So you’re gonna have to give me a second. What is Letterboxd?
Oh, you’re missing out. It’s where people log the movies they’ve watched.
Oftentimes the culture on it is very snarky so people write very pithy reviews. So one of the most satisfying things of the release is just reading those like little snarky little one-liners that people write about them.
It seems like such an avant-garde film in a way, like such an Indie film. I hope that you find an audience.
Yeah, I think there’s a certain kind of person who really wants to see it and obviously at some point they’ll get a chance, even if it’s just on YouTube. I didn’t realize just how specialty it was until I started showing it to distributors.
So what’s next is you’re just going to try to get the film out there?
Well, I’m writing my next movie as well. I’m back in that my favorite place to be, which is that sort of dreamy, anything is possible words on a page. But I’m gonna take a really long time with this one, so nobody expect anything from me, okay? And as a message to anyone reading this, I do need money. So I am available to freelance.
It was really fun and a real pleasure to meet you. All right, and best of luck with everything
Thanks.