I was drafted into this project as a ‘rotoboi’ – with the sole task of rotoscoping footballers and associated characters. I’d dabbled in rotoscoping before, but never to this level of detail or scale. I was on this project for about five weeks and my quota was to rotoscope one footballer per day. Sometimes this was fairly achievable – and other days I’d come to six o’clock and realise I’d only done 30 frames out of a 90 frame clip. 

You can be driven to insanity when you rotoscope. I’m quite sure I was; it’s monotonous,  can make you uncomfortably restless, and very demoralising when you start to realise just how long it will take you to get to the end of the clip. 

But I distinctly remember it also being almost therapeutic – after I’d gone insane and come out the other side, rotoscoping turned out to be an excellent time for deep thinking (while still earning decent freelance money!) I’d just got to the final ten for a short film fund with the project Time After Time, only to be told at the final hurdle our team wouldn’t be getting any money after all. It’s the way it goes; not everyone gets funding – but it was still very painful to get so close. But this process had opened my eyes to the reality of these film funds; all they really provide is the money (and maybe an annoying nagging voice that tries to get in the way of your creative angle as a director). As I worked through these thoughts, I realised that all I needed to make a film was some money; that aside from some positive affirmation, these film funds aren’t actually the gatekeepers that I previously thought they were. And so the first seeds of Bananacide began germinating in my big wet brain – all while I was cutting out Pelé from an archive clip. Maybe I didn’t actually make it out the other side of insanity.