Barfly // Film

High noon has never been this small. In a dusty western frontier inhabited by bugs, a game of poker spirals into a high-stakes duel between six-legged outlaws. Painterly animation, gritty textures, and offbeat humor blends to make BarFly, a tale of greed in the microscopic Wild West.

Over the course of a year, I worked to create a fully fleshed out world revolving around insects and their feuds in the old west. Through hundreds of tests and experiments, I landed on a painterly animation style and real life textures to bring these bugs to life. With the help of HOWND, I created a gritty soundscape, remixing the tone of a desert western to something quirky and unconventional.

BarFly used a new and untested workflow of many different programs and techniques in both production and post production. Cel, VFX, sound, illustration, and compositing all concurrently happening in different programs with different processes to create a unique animation pipeline that helped shape the tone of this film.