Empty Nest (2020)

The award-winning animated short!

Every so often, I go through the period where I create birds as an ode to joy. In the summer of 2019, I was creating a lot of this bird art and posting it all online. People responded really well to them! One person who responded was Lori Burton née Bilter, who was a classmate of mine at Ringling. She was now the head of the animation department at Booker High School for the Visual & Performing Arts in Sarasota, Florida.

Lori reached out and wondered if I was interested in having my birds animated. I said “Of course!” and told her that I’d actually boarded out a story just the week before. Can you say serendipity?

My story was about three little birds leaving the nest, which is what I was preparing for as our last two children were finishing up high school to leave for college.

I had also written a song and recorded a demo, so that was ready to go to, too. I asked my youngest son, Carson, a bassoonist and music theorist, to transcribed the song into sheet music, and he agreed to help:

We setup a time to come to the school and meet the class. It was a small group but filled with budding animation students eager to work on my project. I can come on strong so they may have been scared of me, but I’ll never be sure. Regardless, it was exciting to meet the team.

There was a lot of back and forth and things started pretty smoothly. The goal was to time the animation to my music. I put a lot of pressure on them to be thorough and communicated this constantly. I take great pride in what I do and wanted this to be really good. Feeling pressure is how I learned and felt that it was needed for this project. I hope they understood that.

Then we put our noses down and produced an animated short. Here are some moments from the process.

Empty Nest was released at the beginning of COVID, and went on to win various awards and get accepted into numerous of Film Festivals. Overall, it was a creative success for everyone!

Lori, Maren, Tallulah, Janeth and Matthew: Thank you for making this non-commercial venture something to remember. I will always cherish our time working together.

So. . . without further ado. . .

Empty Nest!