Dec 4, 2018

Watch: Trevor Jimenez on Making the Short Film "Weekend"

The nominations for the Annie Awards for Best Animated Short were announced yesterday, and only one film from the United States was nominated: "Weekend," directed by Trevor Jimenez.

This 15-minute hand-drawn film features a young boy who travels between the homes of his recently divorced parents. The film is based on director Jimenez's personal experiences growing up in a divorced family in 1980s Toronto, but with a touch of the hallucinatory and surreal to help us understand the protagonist's state of mind.

The film, Jimenez's professional short film debut, was independently produced over a period of nearly a decade while working full-time as a story artist at Pixar.

Giménez produced the film through Pixar's Co-op program, a program that allows studio artists to use company equipment and personnel to produce films in their spare time. Previous shorts made through this program include "The Dam Keeper" by Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi and "Borrowed Time" by Andrew Coates and Lou Hamou-Raj, both of which were nominated for Academy Awards.

Jimenez sat down with Cartoon Brew last June at the Annecy Animation Festival in France to discuss the creative process of developing the film and balancing production while holding down a full-time industry job.