Extreme Selfie

A Man Obsessed with Photographing his Face Takes his Hobby to the Grave

Produced for Adult Swim, Greg Sharp and business partner Ivan Dixon have created seven hilarious animated shorts of 10 – 60 seconds in length. Joining them in this animation slot  has been a host of their other animator friends: including CRCR, Joseph Bennett, and David O’Reilly.

Extreme Selfie, created by Greg’s co-owned company Rubber House, was inspired partly by an idea he had at art school, and partly by a quote from Hunter S. Thompson: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”.

‘When I was in art school I had the idea that I would take a photo of myself each day for the rest of my life, and also install a video camera in my coffin to continue the documentation of my decay. I did it for one month and gave up.’

Designed in a  loose, old-school style, Extreme Selfie uses no line-work on the outside of the character, making it more efficient. ‘In general we follow the Pareto principle,’ Greg told us, ‘Put 80% of your effort in 20% of the scenes (because they will be memorable).’

The Plus: Do you have a particular source of inspiration?
Greg Sharp: I come from a conceptual art background so my inspirations are spread very wide as we were taught to do. But particularly, the online independent animation scene at the moment has so many talented individuals making their own films and it is very inspiring, I mostly animate for them to watch.

TP: Was there anything technically difficult to achieve in this animation?
GS: I intentionally made the short loose and free, so I could happily animate without any technical headaches, and try to have fun with it. By lowering the degree of exactitude as an artist, you can explore other things – in this case, an overall sense of growth spurts and shrinkage with age.

TP: What are you working on now/next?
GS: Currently we’re producing a pilot for Nickelodeon and are about to release our first iOs game that we produced in-house. We’ve always got one or two projects in production for ourselves too.