An artist profile built from the artist's own life: magazine clippings, photographs, and discarded artwork, handed over as raw material and animated into a portrait so personal that people assumed Mars had made it themselves.
Mars is a transgender artist from Florida. Laundry Service conducted the interview and gathered the materials. Artwork, photography, clippings, even pieces Mars had discarded, assembled into a dozen layered tableaus. Those PSDs were the entire visual world of the film. With them came real creative freedom. Cut it apart, find the story, make it move like Mars.
Laundry Service owned the client relationship and the creative direction, with Adobe Students as their client. They contracted Pixel Fort to execute, and Drew and I did the bulk of the work with wide latitude, shaping the narrative together against their audio edit. The discipline was using only what Mars's life had already made. Nothing imported, nothing decorated. If it's on screen, it came from them.
Everything is a flat card, but the cards live in real light. Shadows fall across them, edges catch, paper folds open into new scenes. We animated on twos at 24, so it carries that 12-frame, handmade pulse. Stop-motion adjacent, Monty Python in its rigging, exploratory and a little rough on purpose. In 2016 it pushed our systems as hard as anything we'd built.
It's expressive, evocative, and political where Mars's life is political. In my career, it's been a rare opportunity to get paid to make something that feels this personal. It remains one of my proudest pieces, and I think the motion still holds up. Part of that is the authenticity Mars brought, in their voice and in their openness to the whole project. It's a testament to them.
People assumed Mars had made it themselves. For a portrait, there is no higher compliment.