Student wins second straight Best Animation Award at Shorttakes
Graduate student Ben Haist’s five-minute long animated film “Cat Lady” won first place in the animation category at the Shorttakes Student Film Festival on May 21. (Conor Cusack/Daily Bruin)
By Nick LaRosa
May 29, 2015 9:13 a.m.
Elderly Edna Katz sits in her nursing home, bored and watching television, when she is shocked to her feet by an advertisement to save homeless cats.
The film that ensues is a five-minute conglomeration of gunpoint robberies and car chases, following Katz’s ambitious plight to save the displaced critters.
Graduate student Ben Haist’s film, “Cat Lady,” was named the winner of this year’s Best Animation Award at the Shorttakes Student Film Festival, an event organized by the Undergraduate Students Association Council Campus Events Commission.
The film concludes with a dedication to Haist’s grandmother, on whom he said he very loosely based the film. However, while Haist said the film’s protagonist shares his grandmother’s affinity for felines, Edna takes her love of cats a step further.
Haist said he thought of the film’s premise when he was doing a character design for another student.
“I don’t know what got into me, but I just thought to myself ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if this old lady was holding a gun?’” Haist said.
Haist said he has thought of many of the ideas for his films in this way: by coming up with one key visual note and developing a story from there.
In his first film, “How to See New York in One Day,” the key visual note is a red hat, which the protagonist follows as it blows through the city. Likewise, he is currently working on his senior thesis, which stems from the idea of harnessing the power of fireflies to communicate.
Greg Kalfayan, former Campus Events commissioner, said this simplistic creative process seems to translate to Haist’s on-screen aesthetic in “Cat Lady.”
“I think what stuck out the most to us judges was that it did a lot with very little,” Kalfayan said. “The frames were sparse and simple, yet you really got a really strong sense of the cat lady in the span of only six minutes.”
His Shorttakes win this year was not the first time Haist has walked away with a Best Animation Award. In 2014, his submission, “How to See New York in One Day,” won the same category at the CEC Shorttakes Student Film Festival, in addition to being recognized as Official Selection at the New Orleans Film Festival and receiving the Spotlight Award at the UCLA Directors Spotlight. Haist said he plans to apply to even more festivals around the country with “Cat Lady.”
Haist said his influence comes from the early animation and illustrative work of the 1950s.
“There was a collection of artists, United Productions of America, that worked in a very flat style, even flatter than the style I work in, but I definitely sought to develop that same, strong shape-language they use while keeping it somewhat realistic,” Haist said.
The film’s visuals are supplemented by an original score, composed by Josh Rodriguez and performed by the UCLA Orchestra. Adam Tilford, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student who saw the film at Shorttakes, drew comparisons between Rodriguez’s arrangement and the work of composer Michael Giacchino, famous for scoring “Up” and “The Incredibles.”
“The soundtrack definitely made me think of Pixar films,” Tilford said. “The way it wove back and forth between the upbeat brass arrangements and slower violin parts was really what drove home each scene. People really seemed to respond to it.”
Haist said he feels blessed to have had his films be as warmly received as they have been by the UCLA community.
“It’s been amazing to get the kind of validation I’ve received from my faculty and this school,” Haist said. “It really is what gives me the courage to submit my film to a bunch of different film festivals and see where it sticks.”
