We were lucky to catch up with Ben Baldwin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

When I first moved to Austin, I would go with my buddy Garrett Lively of Rough Draft Games to see late night movies at the Alamo Drafthouse during “Weird Wednesday”, curated by a special staff of cinephiles with bizarre taste. We watched several low budget and generally obscure flicks and I learned that I could find more at “I Luv Video”, Austin’s only video rental store, now rebooted as “We Luv Video”. On the shelf in the animation aisle was the work of the surreal cartoon juggernaut himself, Bill Plympton. I rented all of his catalogue that spring.

After producing my own cartoons, I reached out to him on Instagram to buy some art that he was selling. I had been talking with his business partner John about purchasing a few select frames (inked drawings on celluloid) from my favorite film of his “I Married a Strange Person”. Bill himself reached out asking if I would be interested in taking his Zoom course after sending him some of my work. His guidance in these courses are what I am putting into practice on my new short about a man who has been abducted by aliens and his quest to get abducted again. It is a mixed media cartoon that blends gouache painted backgrounds, rotoscoping, and hand drawn digital frame by frame techniques. The background music mixes the latin blues, outer worldly analog synth blips, and a somber Mozart sonata. This project is most meaningful to me because of Bill’s guidance.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

One hot July evening, my brother Victor had come to visit from Atlanta and we were talking about making crude cartoons and video games. We figured that we could just draw a couple loose frames on paper, take a photo of them with my phone, record an original piano with vocal narration, and slap the whole thing together in some cheap video production software. That very first cartoon was titled “Beer” and was produced in about an hour.

The storyboard format remained for two years, first using black and white ink drawings before moving to inked borders and colored pencils. Scripts evolved and were written by my dear friends Eric Haugh and Craig LeMay, who also performed much of the voice acting. I was gifted a screenless digital drawing tablet by my family for my birthday and eventually purchased an Adobe Animate subscription. I cut my teeth in frame by frame animation via Tip Tut’s Adobe Animate tutorials on YouTube and created six fully animated shorts, one of which was submitted to a huge film fest held in Austin every spring.

This whole process took about twenty years. It’s difficult for me to say what I could have done differently since each independent study naturally evolved on its own. Knowing how to put these different skills together, I would encourage every artist to remain curious and dabble in as many different practices as their natural interests allow. With time, one should be able to gather these skill sets to form something unique, and sadly, I do not think there is a short cut for this. Give yourself time and remain consistent to a few artistic studies.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Throughout my life, I’ve really loved what I’ve recently learned is termed “outsider art”. Artists who are isolated or who have somehow separated themselves from the outside influences of modern culture. These usually involve unconventional techniques not taught in a school or a robust inner world that they escape to, most likely due to an extreme mental condition. These are artists like Austin’s Daniel Johnston, whose extended stay in psychiatric institutions may have led to his music and drawing being child-like or pure; Lloyd Kaufman with Troma Entertainment, whose surreal and graphic B-films inspire their slogan “40 yeas of disrupting media”; or my personal favorite, R. Stevie Moore, the godfather of home recording who self produced and distributed hundreds of songs before the internet.

The main protagonist of my cartoon “Amateur Night at Club Stupid” is his own outside artist by living in the woods, refusing to work or bathe, whose best friend is a duck that may or may not just be a figment of his imagination, and still wanting to interact with modern society as best he can. I guess it would be silly to attempt to be an outsider artist since they did not consider themselves that when producing their work. They were guided by their inner creative light regardless of what was happening in the outside world around them.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The whole purpose of learning to animate and emulate these films I was watching at Alamo Drafthouse was really an escape from the “music only” hole I had spent the past decade digging myself into with my work. To pivot is really important to an individual’s growth and I think is only natural after doing something over and over without success. Moving to Austin gets you over live music like smoking a carton of cigarettes gets you over smoking, so I think that may have something to do with it as well.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amateurnightatclubstupid/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXsca3yvQMfocIpODjytTZw
• Other: Patreon https://www.patreon.com/amateurnightatclubstupid

Image Credits
All images and drawing are by me, Ben Baldwin of Amateur Night at Club Stupid.