Winner of the 2022 South by Southwest Animated Short Audience Award, our latest pick comes from Aaron Hughes, out of New York. In Five Cents, a consumer finds himself in over his head after a string of purchases gets out of control. “I wanted to capture the anxiety one commonly feels getting trapped on the hamster wheel of spending in current day capitalism,” Hughes told us. “So I thought using the visual of constantly flickering financial pages as rain would be an effective symbolic way to enhance that tension.”

Hughes employed thousands of market data pages from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times to represent the tensions of the market, so to speak. He then drew on them in ink, white-out, gouache paint, gold leaf and other materials.

“I drew every single frame of animation,” he told us. “On separate pages, amounting to thousands of drawings using ink, white-out, gold leaf, gouache paint and other materials. I also stop motion animated some elements (coins, little machines, text etc) physically on top of every page as I was shooting the animation.”

The effect is arresting, and the strobe-like flickering of the pages are especially effective at rendering the viewer ill at ease–but it must have taken some time. Hughes explains, “It was important to me to do this all analogue rather than comping in the elements digitally to keep it as authentically tactile as possible and a little bit old school.

“I wanted to feature basic quintessential products of capitalism reduced down to their most fundamental, pre-digital, OG forms (almost to the point of outdatedness): coins, white-out, newspapers, a landline telephone, escalators, label-makers-made labels etc, so it think it was fitting (although not time saving) to go pre-digital and animate/shoot it traditionally by hand.”

Time was also a factor for this animator when it came to lighting, as it was all shot entirely with natural light. “I ultimately decided natural daylight was much better at picking up all of the wonder texture of the frames than any other kind of artificial lighting that I could afford, so I shot the entire thing next to a window. Also for my own sanity, I much prefer spending all that time shooting next to window as opposed to being cooped up in a small room with artificial lights.

“Unfortunately though, any time a cloud would cover up the sun it would be too dramatic of a light change to keep shooting, so I would have to constantly stop shooting to wait for the cloud to go by. It’s kind of silly that I chose to shoot it this way, but the beauty of it being completely my own project is that I can do it however I want and no one can tell me otherwise- even if it’s not the smartest.”

Since premiering (and winning) at South by Southwest last year, Hughes says he’s, “had a really fun year attending festivals all over. And now after finally releasing it online last week, I don’t really have any other big future plans for it, although my eyes are always open for other opportunities. It’s had a good run.”

For more on the production, check out the bts videos below as well as the gallery of production images–many of which show the pages drying because with wet materials, they couldn’t be piled in stacks, presenting its own issues as the pages spread out around Hughes’ NY apartment (isn’t it just like a committed animator to live with their work day and night).