Waking Life, written and directed by indie icon Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused), is considered the first independent computer-animated feature film ever made in America—an abstract, psychedelic, digital video improv that takes the Disney/Pixar formula and turns it on its perfectly coiffed head. Sabiston and Pallotta, collaborators for three years, have always had that goal in mind, but the major-league debut of Waking Life at the Sundance Film Festival in late January gives them their biggest, most esteemed forum yet: a showcase for an animation style that is unprecedentedly artful. They use computers to paint reality, not mimic it. In that sense alone, Waking Life, made with the help of Sabiston’s homegrown software, swims against the photo-realistic tide. Sabiston’s as-yetunnamed creation—nicknamed “RotoShop” by some Waking Life artists—is so simple that even neophytes can quickly master an otherwise daunting process known as interpolated rotoscoping, in which animators trace over live-action DV footage.

In Waking Life, the most linear Sabiston-Pallotta film to date, Wiley Wiggins—the skinny, rubber-faced kid brother in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused—serves as a kind of floating human consciousness that consorts with street gurus and other entities. The series of seemingly random vignettes follows Wiggins on a dreamlike journey in which shape-shifting characters talk about life and death. Essence is revealed not in the ways that characters remain constant, but in the ways they constantly change.

After the edited footage was loaded onto G4s, a team of Austin artists began the nearly yearlong process of turning video into animation. Each actor was drawn, or “interpreted,” by a different artist, intentionally lending every character a distinctive style.

Sabiston and Pallotta had no trouble rounding up a rogue animation crew. In true Austin-indie style, the partners posted flyers in coffee shops and art supply stores, and recruited at University of Texas student art shows. Some of their hires were painters who had no experience with computers, much less computer animation or rotoscoping.
(Richard Baimbridge)