To put it frankly, the Vaccese twins are fairly intense, and this aptly defines not only to their wildly imaginative short film The Scritch-Stratch of Busy Little Hands but also their approach to animation, particularly when it comes to—oh, little necessities, say sleeping. “I hardly get any.  I know so many filmmakers and artists that can set deadlines for themselves and say, “Okay, it's 3AM, and it's bed time.” But, Joy and I work for days on end with no sleep, and we've been that way since we were little. Sleeping is giving in,” Noelle says. 

While the sisters always knew they wanted to work as artists, their path to animation wasn’t direct. As students at Pratt Institute, they both started in illustration.

“We were friends with a lot of animators, and when we saw their drawings come to life on the screen—before they were even colored in and just done in pencil—we just thought that we had to do that,” Joy explains. “I never wanted to be an animator. I knew how hard it was going to be, but, when I saw that for the first time, I just thought it was so amazing. We just decided to change majors, and we both did it together.”

 “Everyone in the animation department was like, “Who are these twins from illustration?" Noelle adds laughingly, picking up the thread of thought.

“It was just so weird, you know?,” Joy admits. “Who does that? But, we are weird.”

Here in a tag team interview, Joy and Noelle bounce off one another fluidly, expressing their thoughts with respectful pauses left in between, both refusing to interrupt the other—unless that is the topic rallies excitement in both and in which case all bets are off, sentences overlapping at rapid pace. At times it’s hard to tell their voices apart. They are twins after all.

SM: You’ve both said that you had spent originally eight months working on the short, and you ended up scraping most of that eight months work except for the basic story. You’ve also said that you had ten different endings. I was hoping you could tell me what the process was like—it being the first project you were both working on together—knowing that you’d be butting heads a bit as you went along.

NV: At first it didn’t seem it was going to be that bad. We were having a lot of fun in the beginning, but I remember one big argument where we both were just getting so frustrated with the idea. It wasn’t going the way we wanted it to, and we exploded on each other, then just decided, “Let’s toss this whole thing because it’s not making either one of us happy.” That was just a really big step for the both of us, to be able to say, “Here’s 300 drawings. I hate them. I’m throwing them out.” It’s really hard to do.

JV: This was for our senior thesis project in our animation class. Usually students do it individually, but we wanted to do it together because we wanted it to be this evolution of both of our styles coming together, working with somebody. In reality, when you make a film, there’s always people helping you. Sometimes amazing, independent animators do do it by themselves, and they lock themselves in a room for months and months on end, but you usually need some help.

Sometimes it’s good to see another person’s perspective because you kind of get tunnel vision when you’re working on your own, and you fall in love with your work. It’s hard to part with ideas if you don’t have somebody else to look at it for you and tell you what they think.

SM: How would you each describe your aesthetics individually?

NV: I’m highly influenced by Ralph Steadman and Edward Gorey. I just like really dark, creepy styles. I’m not into the fluffy bunny thing—unless they’re creepy, fluffy bunnies. That is what I’m drawn to, what I mostly draw in my spare time and comes out in almost every single little short film that I’ve done.

A huge influence on the both of us is Gerald Scarfe, a cartoonist.  His designs and direction for the animation in Pink Floyd's The Wall impacted us so much when we were younger, from the time we first saw our the album cover in our mom's box of old records to actually seeing the animation in the film years later.  We saw those characters and just thought they were amazing.

Noelle adds this above note about Gerald Scarfe’s work later by e-mail.

JV: I really like getting detailed with my work, and I like stuff to look really tactile, hand drawn but at the same time have a graphic look to it that’s all the same, sort of like—Noelle, can you help me out? I’m forgetting the Gorillaz’s animator’s name.

NV: Jaime Hewlett. 

JV: Like his style for the Gorillaz, all their music videos. It’s mixed media. I loved mixed media with animation.

SM: Are there certain shots in the short that you can say, “Oh, this is more influenced by me, or that is more influenced by me?” Or, did you just do the very best you could to amalgamate both styles?

NV: I think the second choice is true…I did a lot of the nun just because that was a creepy character that kind of was a huge reason for doing the film. She’s just a scary little character that I made, and I definitely wanted to use this character at some point. After I was drawing it, and Joy was drawing it, the character changed. If I was working on the janitor and I handed it off to Joy, her style would come through there. Pretty much for every scene that’s how it happened. If I started it and she finished it, there you go, there’s both of us there.

JV: In the beginning, we more or less were going to say, “Well, the nun is your character,” and I would do that main character while she would draw the kid with the crazy hair, the mean little boy, for example. When they’re having the dialogue in the first bus stop scene, we each animated separately. I took one kid, and she took the other. Then, as time went on, and it was time to finish the film and we were coming up to our deadline, we’d have to take over all the characters. Whoever wasn’t scanning would have to draw, and we’d switch off.

NV:--Which was hard actually because I’d have to keep referring to Joy’s drawings. How do I make it look like her character?

JV: After a while, you had to just do it, but in the beginning, it was hard to get yourself to be like, “Okay, I’m going to draw exactly like you.” 

SM: I want to talk about some of the big themes from Scritch-Scratch. Obviously, the first is Catholicism…Do you notice that within Catholicism itself you have the innocence of Mary, the comforting side to Catholicism before it gets strange and sexy? It’s like the Saint Augustine dichotomy where women can either be saints or prostitutes. When I was watching the short, that’s what occurred to me, that there was something so innocent about the imagination of this child but at the same time, there was an incredible sexiness to the frames. So, I was hoping that you could talk about Catholicism but also these themes of sexiness and innocence.

NV: In Catholic school, I feel like little boys and girls are so repressed, and so sometimes, even though they are so innocent, they do tend to have these over-imaginative, probably sexual ideas. The little boy is just standing there, drawing this sexy girl across the street. It just seemed like it would be a good little gag, but also, it’s kind of true. You’re not supposed to be thinking that. This whole film is about kids doing things that they’re not supposed to do and getting in trouble for it.

JV: I just remember the whole idea behind the girl is that she’s supposed to jumpstart the evil in the film. Women in film—there was this era where women, or just sex in general, meant that you were going to die or something bad was going to happen, like in the beginning scene of Jaws, where the sexy girl is in the water and then all the sudden the sharks come and kill everybody. Or, in Stephen King novel’s, for example, sex equals death. The sexy girl—oh, and the nun too—they’re both kind of evil—not that I think women are evil, but I just think sexiness in Catholic school is so forbidden.

SM: Now, this protagonist just has an incredible imagination, which made me wonder what filled your imaginations when you were growing up.

JV: Well, we both wanted to be artists since we were little kids and drew constantly.

NV: I drew things that never made sense…I was just hugely influenced by Salvador Dali, all his work, the surrealism. I like Dada a little bit too. I just always liked this creepy [feel that] things don’t look right; you don’t even know what it is that you’re looking at, but you know it’s highly meaningful.

JV: We really didn’t like being in Catholic school either, so [it was] just trying to illustrate how you want to go someplace to escape, how horrible it is and how much you hate it. It’s just different from regular school. It really is so repressive. It’s not just the uniforms. It’s everything.

SM: I know you’ve said that you really liked growing up twins. In another interview, you said that you used to switch classes all the time. There was one time—I can’t remember who it was—had a CG class and the other had a Spanish class…

NV: Joy hated her Spanish class, and I loved my CG class. It was ninth period, it was the end of the day and everyone would mess around on the computers, and she always came in there like, “I don’t want to go to Spanish anymore.” I was just like, “Fine!” It was ridiculously lax at our high school so my teacher didn’t even notice that I’d leave. I’d just go up upstairs, and the [Spanish teacher] was just like, “Uh, were you wearing a different shirt?” "No." She was like, “Oh,” and went on teaching. It was really funny.

JV: It’s even funnier because they knew we were twins, and the class she had ninth period, I had second period, so my teacher had already seen me that day. It was just like, “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this right now.” All the students knew and never said anything.

I remember one time, when we were younger, in fourth grade in Catholic school, we did that for the first time, switching classes and being little bad asses.

NV: Joy, you said “bad assess” in an interview!

JV: Oh, I’m sorry.

SM: No, that’s awesome.

We all laugh for a few seconds here.

JV: Well, we thought we were cool, and we met up in the bathroom and went into each other’s separate classes when we left the bathroom. I’m hanging out in the class, not saying anything. We’d grown up with these kids since kindergarten, and they knew. They’re looking at us, and it’s like “Oh, they know,” and then trying to be quiet. Then there’s something evil about these kids, and they start telling on me. I was just like, “This is not cool!” Then the teacher made us switch, and it sucked. But, it was fun for a minute.

NV: The hardest thing was trying to remember to answer to ‘Joy’. I’d forget that’s supposed to be your name for right now. You’d think it’d be a lot easier than it is, but when someone’s look at you, and they’re not saying your name, it’s just weird.

JV: They’d be like, “Noelle, Noelle, Noelle.” Then, one of the students would nudge me, and be like, “That’s you.”

SM: It’s a little early in the process to talk about this because this is the first short you’ve done collaboratively…but, do you see any thematic obsessions that you seem to have without necessarily realizing it when you start a project but by the time you end the project, it’s like, “Wow, wait a second.”

NV: When I was cutting my reel, I was just like, “Wow, I’ve either got to always destroy things or do something that’s really ugly—but it’s kind of cute at the same time. It’s like making cute go bad.” And, Joy does it too. Actually, one of our teachers, our first animation teacher, was talking about us to another class [that followed ours]… He’s was using us as an example, and he said, “The twins always break stuff. They like to destroy things." I remember hearing that, and I never realized that I did it. I thought, “Wow, I guess it’s true,” and I kind of like that. I’m never going to do anything really cute unless something kills it.

JV: Yeah, we always work with that cute gone bad. Our reels—I’m working on one right now—there are these themes of the surreal, usually a very limited color palate, if any. We like working in black-and-white, I don’t know why; it’s that film noir look and feel.

This is actually the first film that we made that made sense. If I made a short film in a class, and Noelle was in a different class, we usually both worked on our animations together anyway. It’s late nights, and it’s long hours...So, that’s another reason that we did the film together. We figured, “Why make two films when we can just make a really good one?” Nothing ever made any sense [up to that point]. It was great to just sit down, have the time and be like “Okay, we want this film to have a beginning, middle and end and have themes and all of this.”

NV: It doesn’t even really have a story. It’s kind of a weird idea more than it is a story. At the end, you’re still kind of like, “What the hell did I just watch?”

The twins burst out laughing together.

NV: But, it does make sense a little bit. I did notice something else, especially with our earlier animations, Joy. You did more—what’s the word?—yours were definitely more creepy and sad, and mine were more funny. (The Scritch-Scratch of Busy Little Hands) put those things together. Didn’t you notice that from our character animation class and the different things we worked on before this film?

JV: Definitely, in the beginning. I was way into Tim Burton-type characters with the droopy, sad eyes. Before we got into writing stories for animation, it was all just character based, and we would just make everything really emotional. It was supposed to make the character come alive and have feeling, and I guess I was sad. Now I try to make it more light-hearted and funny.

SM: What is usually the first line that you draw of a character?

JV: I think I do the eyes first.

NV: I used to do that, but now I do the head first I think. Or, sometimes I’ll just make an overall shape for the body. The nun, I remember, was just a shape.

JV: Yeah, that’s the best way to go actually.

NV: Sometimes I do that when I can’t think of what to draw. I’ll just make a really weird swiggle and then try to make a character from it.

SM: When you’re fully in the mode of doing work, how many hours a day will you spend drawing and sketching?

JV: I like to sit down for a really long time and get really into my work, so probably about six hours. I can’t just start working for about two hours and then get up and do something else... That’s a really bad way to work because when you know you’re going to be sitting down for a long time, you really don’t feel like working. But, then when you start, it comes really naturally.

SM: Do you find that when you’re doing a long haul like that that you can immediately jump into doing something you’re happy with, or do you have a warm-up period and a cool down period?

JV: Definitely, a warm-up period and a cool down. Everything with animation is so scattered, and everything’s all over the place, so you have to get back into it. You’ve got to remember where you left off. It really helps to sketch for a while first before you start drawing for real again.

We didn’t pencil test for this film really. Whatever we drew, that’s what we were using. We just didn’t have time. Sometimes it’s just better to see how it looks and then make it official.

SM: What pencils did you end up using, just a variety?

NV: HB and 2B.

JV: We don’t like using too dark of a line.

NV: Then we inked over them in Micron pens—what was .005 and .008?

JV: We ranged from fine lines to thicker, messier [ones] so it could have that inkblot look. That was really time-consuming but really fun. That’s when I started feeling like an artist again because it looked really finished. 

NV: It’s cool because with animation, you’re always rushing through drawings to get to the next one. You just want to see if it works, it moves well and then you move on. The inking was cool because it was kind of like illustration again, like “Wow, I get to spend at least 10 minutes on this drawing.”

SM: So, with the first eight months cut out, what was your final run time? How many months did it actually take with the finished drawings?

NV: I remember starting that bus scene in February, so it’s four months.

SM: That’s actually pretty fast though.

JV: I know. We changed so much though. We actually had worked on scenes that we just threw away.

NV: There was a scene actually shot on the bus where there’s this whole big fight, and we’re just like, “We don’t need it. Scratch it. We’re not going to animate that whole scene.”

JV: I was set on having this film be at most three minutes. It was actually going to be a cool scene, and it worked really well. But, it just didn’t work as well as everything else...

SM: So, at this point, you have the drawings, and they get turned over to Arthur Metcalf, who did the end editing and AfterEffects. What was it like giving him the scans and seeing what was going to come out from his end?

NV: When we first decided to work with him, I was so happy and so scared at the same time. No one had seen the film yet. Joy and I had already graduated Pratt, and we were just trying to make it to show at the animation show at the end. So, when we changed our idea, our class hadn’t even seen it. No one knew this new idea, and I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, Arthur’s going to hate it.” We’re like, “We have to make it make sense.”

JV: We were so all over the place. We knew there was a method to our madness, and we’ll be able to figure this out. But, if we give it to somebody else, it’s going to take so much time telling him what we’re trying to say.

NV: The greatest thing is Arthur really understood right away, and he would just go with it. I remember he was helping us think of little gags to do, and he just made it so much easier to actually finish, not just because he was doing the editing with us. We needed to set everything down in stone before we gave it to him, otherwise, who knows how long Joy and I would spend on something. We’re perfectionists even when we’re messy, so we would’ve taken forever.

SM: Last big question: It’s out in the world now. Where else are you guys trying to get it out to?

NV: We submitted to about five or six film festivals so far. Woodstock Film Festival, Ottawa—just got our rejection letter from Ottawa today.

SM: Oh, no!

NV: Our first rejection. No, that felt good in a way. It was just like, “I’m really doing this now. I got rejected.”

SM: I know now you’re both working freelance and on a new short, and I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the new short at all.

NV: The new short is basically just a mess of sketches and ideas that—I stole this term from my animation teacher—are in an “idea morgue” right now, and we’re probably just going to pull them out when we’re ready. Joy and I haven’t even really discussed anything set in stone yet. We’re just still recovering from our last film—which has taken too long. Everyday I look at my drawing table, and I’m like, “Alright, make a film.”

JV: Well, we know we want to do something will that character, right?

NV: When we got the film on MySpace, there were so many people writing to us and saying, “Oh, make another one. We love that kid.” Some people were telling us not to do it, just move on and do something else, but I had fun with it, and it’s already an idea. There you go, you have your character and everything he does, so why not run with it?

JV: …If it’s the same character, I don’t want it to be a sequel.

NV: More like a comic book kind of feel. You know, “Here’s the next issue.”

SM: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you wanted to add?

JV: Do you want to talk about how much you love making films with me?

NV: I felt so bad for our neighbors.

Joy laughs. 

NV: In our Brooklyn apartment, the walls are really thin, and Joy and I would scream at each other over just a shot that I thought worked, and she didn’t think worked. 

JV: Like, “You’re not listening to any of my ideas.”

NV: That was a big one in the beginning. “This is your film, not mine.” We would come into class in the morning just hating each other.

JV: Our roommate would just laugh. We have a roommate who’s our best friend from college, and she would laugh because she knew we were going to be yelling and fighting. She’d be like, “I don’t know how you guys fight like that.” But, at the same time, it’s the best because you can’t yell at anybody like that and have them still be your friend.

NV: We’d get it out, and then five minutes later we’d be like, “What do you want to do tonight, or what are we having for dinner?” It’d just be forgotten because, you know, it’s just a film. But, now, I totally want to work on my next film with Joy. I’m not even thinking about my own stuff yet, which I will.

That’s a good question that no one’s really asked…Actually, it’s not a question I’ve been wanting people to ask but I’m waiting for it, expecting it: Why won’t you just work on your own film? When are you going to be an individual?
JV: Oh, I hate that.

NV: No one’s asked it really, but I feel like it’s there. My answer to that is: I guess I will when I have an idea that’s mine, and I don’t want anybody else to be part of it. That’s when I’ll do it, but right now I’m having too much fun.

For more information visit www.myspace.com/twinsareweird.

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