"How to Tell if I'm High" is an animated comedy video about a man who may or may not be high. It is part of my YellCo comedy collaboration with Kevin Hull, Shanna Polley, and Sarah Rogers. The initial concept and music were created by Kevin, the character design is by Shanna Polley, and I illustrated, and animated the final video.
The short makes use of different frame rates to convey the slippage of time when someone is high. The single event of the film, Bill Gateway pressing the letter 'h' on his keyboard, takes forever, and once he's done that his hands are seen moving at 60 frames per second, whereas the rest of the short is animated at 8 frames per second.
As with much of my other work, this short was designed to be "goodbad," or "so-bad-it's-good." The music was composed to be heard in higher fidelity, but we chose to keep the basic MIDI instrumentation for this reason. The illustration is intentionally crude and includes low number of actual frame-by-frame animations -- and one of them is a .gif animation of fire from the 1990's internet.
Below is a selection of stills from the short.
