Glazed and Confused - Or: How We Spent a Lot of Time Learning What We Already Knew

The working title of our new short is Glazed and Confused, and it’s starting to feel a bit on the nose.

We began the same way we did last time: I asked my talented Italian friend Giulio to animate DJ Smoothback in rough. He just gets the character — the posture, the rhythm, the low-level existential angst — and I wanted to keep that consistency going.

Where we tried to change things was in the clean-up. Last time, it was a painfully slow, entirely manual process. Looked great. Nearly broke us. So this time I thought: what if we tried something clever?

Moho came up as the answer. It’s supposed to be great for combining rigged animation with a hand-drawn feel — flexible, efficient, and all that.

I got in touch with Dani Abram, who knows the software inside out, and asked if we should build a full turnaround rig. She very politely warned me off the idea — said it would take ages and ultimately limit what we could do. Fair.

Instead, she built a really nice rig — DJ Smoothback with a 180° head turn, loads of clever controls, and enough flexibility to keep things loose. In theory, it ticked all the boxes.

Then I brought in Nico, an animator based in Chile, to help with some R&D. I’d seen his work through Cas Van De Pol — the guy who makes those chaotic YouTube recaps of films and games (3 million+ subscribers, for good reason). Nico jumped in to test the rig and explore how far we could push the performance.

We spent four hours trying it out. Managed four frames. Total.

It just wasn’t going to work. The moment we needed DJ to actually act, we hit a wall. The rig wasn’t broken — it just couldn’t deliver the kind of nuance we wanted without building a new version for every scene. Which defeats the whole point of using a rig in the first place.

So now we’ve done what any reasonable person would do after spending weeks experimenting with a more efficient workflow:

We’ve literally gone back to the drawing board.

Lesson learned: software tricks and hacks are great, but usually, just drawing is the best way. Moho still has its place — and we’ll use it when it makes sense — but for this film, it’s back to basics. Pencil, paper (metaphorically), and a lot of elbow grease.

Glazed and Confused is still very much alive. Slower, scrappier, and more handmade than we planned — but probably better for it. PS: We put the same care and craft into brand stories as we do our own films. If you’d like to chat about bringing your next idea to life, drop us a line.