Deep Shit was finished in 2011 after a period of 3 years. It’s a ten minute animation short about reality and rock & roll ambition. It plays with the notion of metaphysics, good & evil, the devil in rock & roll, jealousy, losing what you never had, drugs and the history of popular music.

In short: two rivalling bands rehearse in two rooms of the same bar. They want succes but not do the work to get there. The barman hosts the devil in his cash machine and they ask for his help. They travel to their maker to ask to be designed as a successful band rather than the bunch of losers that they are but then they dramatically fail.

For this film I wrote the script, dialogues, did the design and direction, and the music. Please check the credits because this film was made with the help of a lot of people ignoring the need of sleep and money.

Baby Doom, the niece of my returning character Baby Boom, plays the main role in the animation film ‘Deep Shit’ I directed.

All characters have a colour scheme of three main colours and their first derivates (shadow and light), so the challenge was to have ‘material expression’ (latex, jeans, skin etc) by more or less contrast in the ton-sur-ton shading.

She is the smartest character in ‘Deep Shit’. Baby Doom comes from an upper class family, but tries to hide that from her punk friends by talking as cockney as she can. She is the singer of the Brides of Mayhem and one of the two contributors of the compositions.

these are band members of Lucifero in Deep Shit. Band members of ‘the Sparks from Hell’ were designed after jazz musicians. I thought they looked great and made some illustrations with them.

In the beginning of the film, baas player Rick Modder walks on the street, passing a pretty lady turning his neck into rubber.

The Satanettes are the backing vocalists of Lucifero in Deep Shit.

Skindeep is the owner of the bar ‘Deep Shit’. He has no legs, and the bar stays as half a walnut around him. he lives in his bar and does not ever need to go anywhere.

Fruitcake is a sleeping, dead or stoned hippy that is quite dried out over the years and stuck to the bar, at Deep Shit. However, from between his feathers come the LSD pills the devil offers the musicians in the bar.

Jean Paul Saté is the singer of a electro-wave band, that rehearses in the same bar as the Brides Of Mayhem do. There is a huge twist over the use of electric guitars in music. Jean Paul has a button of himself on his coat and says often that his band ‘The Forgotten Targets’ is famous in France as ‘Les Cibles Oubliées’

The two bands in Deep can’t stand each other but are their equals in laziness and ambition. My assistant and I spent a whole day on designing the most irritating hairdo we could think of.

Lucifero is the name the devil prefers to be called by, in Deep Shit. He hates punk, new wave, or any music that the bands play in the film. He likes Duke Ellington. Everybody goes to hell nowadays, so his role is merely symbolic – and he hates that too.

But because the Brides of Mayhem is a band that is very ambitious but does not want to practice, he does his old trick once again: he gives them pills so they can ‘meet their maker’ and ask him to be more succesful.

Well, he is as lazy as the musicians basically – he just steals LSD from a stuck-to-the-bar dead hippie and tells a little story. Lucifero lives in the cash machine of a bar with the name ‘Deep Shit’ in which part of the movie plays.

Lucifero comes with a great band, with beëlzebubs playing the instruments.

this dove can be seen in action at the end of. ‘Deep Shit’, a short animated movie I made, with of course many others (see the credits!)

I wanted this dove to be too heavy to fly properly, but we were a bit at the end of our budget. That’s how it goes. Having the bird fly the way I wanted would cost an animator another day and i squeezed the last energy out of them the way we made it already. But on the picture when you swipe, you can see how I had it in mind.

Cor Steijn Jr. is the keyboard player of ‘The Forgotten Targets’, the rivalling band of ‘Brides of Mayhem’ in which Baby Doom sings.

As usual, the side characters are much fun. Like Fruitcake, the hippie that was always referred to as a ‘stool pigeon’ who turns out to be dead for a long time, the shitting pigeon that shows there must be land in the neighbourhood, the funky girl on the street and ‘Skindeep’ the bartender of Deep Shit, who has no legs but a belly that is so round that the bar is built around it.

Rick Modder is the bass player of the Brides of Mayhem. He is based on a special brand of (often Spanish and italian) 60’s punks I saw in Café De Diepte in Amsterdam, which was one of my main inspirations for the movie altogether. Best place to ever exist for a time too short.

The Hammer is the drummer of the Brides of Mayhem. Nobody ever heard him talk, but everybody sure heard him beat the drum kit.

Cor Steijn Jr. is the keyboard player of The Forgotten Targets. He’s more into Progressive Rock than into Synth Wave, but what can you do in a one horse town? Besides that, singer Jean Paul Saté totally overpowers him.

Blister is the guitarist of the punk band Brides of Mayhem. He is almost as smart as Baby Doom, the main character. But he gets angry too easily and then he breaks things, like jaws and eye sockets.

The Soundtrack for Deep Shit is very important for the story. Not only did I try to run through pop music history from -say- the 40s to the 70’s; the music shows that we have different interpretations of what we hold for the truth. Two bands wrote the same song accidentally but their execution is very different. One is a punk rock version in English while the other one is a synth wave version in French. This concept foreshadows the idea of a Platonic ‘Ideal World’ where ideas are pure and we tap into that world to work with derivates of the original and pure ideas.

In the animated short, the animated characters travel to the world of the artist creating them, to ask him to design them as more successful. They get help from the devil, making the music even more fun: popular music and satanism always went hand in hand.

The music was written by me and performed by the Spinshots, Boyd Small, the Van Dijck Sisters and Edwin Slothouber.

(Shut Your Trap and) Sell Your Soul is sung by Boyd Small, a friend who happens to be a fantastic singer. He did the voice for ‘Lucifero’ in my animated short Deep Shit.

It’s a given fact famous people sold their soul to the devil, and in this song the devil explains why that isn’t as bad as it seems: ‘effortlessly making waves!’ – and what is your soul worth anyway? (In Deep Shit, God is dead long time, and everybody goes to hell. The devil has a merely ceremonial job and he is really, really tired of it).

‘Sell Your Soul’ was sung by Boyd Small. I wrote the song for my animation short ‘Deep Shit’ and performed it with the Spinshots. Boyd did the voice of ‘Lucifero’ in the film and since he is a great blues singer – I asked him to take the lead on this one.

‘Sell Your Soul’ (and shut your trap) is the key tune from Deep Shit, an animated short I did with quite a team. (check the film here)
We performed the song with the Spinshots, with the Van Dijck Sisters at the backings. It turned out to be a great tune so we made a videoclip for it as well – in Jelle Mulder’s studio around the corner of mine.

If you swipe to the right you’ll see the 10 minute animation movie with more music by the Spinshots and friends!

The theatrical poster for ‘Deep Shit’ – in the tradition of Saul Bass, I tried to capture the story in one image. In this case: ‘we’re all going down’.
Also, I made beer mats and other stuff for the promotion of the film.

Educated as a graphic designer, i know that end credits of movies do not get the attention they deserve. As a film buff, I hate it when people even do as much as whisper during the beginning titles but i lost hope for the end credits. A good film has great titles, until the very end! Now I would not say my animated short ‘Deep Shit’ is a ‘good’ movie, but the end credits are perhaps the best part of it. The theme music, that was played incorrectly by the punk band at the start of the movie, now in it’s perfect glam style, (listen to that bass! i am proud of that!) but mostly: look at those titles!

So I posted the stills here – all of them are worth a good look. Some pictures are inspired by real life – like the devil lying on the floor, that drawing is inspired by a photo I took of my friend Rosto when he produced (or tried to) my punk band Disaster Nein. The film itself has references to Café ‘De Diepte’ that I used to frequent and of course to Maloe Melo and the squat Occii. If you’re not from Amsterdam these names don’t say much, but for connoisseurs of the Dutch metropolitan underground it does.

You can see the film here – the titles start at 9.16

‘Holy Door’ is the name of the record company in my animated short ‘Deep Shit’. It needed a logo for their flyer, in which they invite bands to not bore them for a time frame of 3 minutes.

When the devil sings his song to lure them into selling their soul, the musicians in ‘Deep Shit’ get to see a few magazines in which they will be featured once they are famous. Of course, those magazines had to be designed, even though you could only see them for less than half a second. But here are the spreads you see in the movie, if you don’t blink your eyes.

In the animated short ‘Deep Shit’ we needed a lot of graphic design within the over all design. Like magazines, papers, posters, flyers and logos. The ‘Tempo Futura’ is, like the others, a newspaper as presented by the devil – to show what their world will be like once they are famous.

Backgrounds for the animates short ‘Deep Shit’. For this film i did the script, the design, the direction and the music. Most is drawn in illustrator, even the characters. It was kind of hard to work with the right colour schemes as this film needed to shout in every way: as you can see, the backgrounds at the rehearsal spot gather everything that possible can amplify sound as the punkband ‘The Brides of Mayhem’ wanted to be the loudest of their town.

In the ‘decor’ are several secret jokes that are hard to see in the movie because everything moves and scenes are really short. So enjoy the original designs here, not moving and on your screen as long as you want!

‘Lady Justice’ at the court building in my animation film ‘Deep Shit’.

Part of the fun of making an animation movie is making the props: things the character use, hold or are just there in the background. We could do a lot of inside jokes here. The scenes were so short and the images so rapidly moving that you’d hardly see the naughty jokes we’d make. Here you can quench the bottomless thirst of your inner pervert ast the images are frozen and as long on your screen as you wish.

sketches and parts of the storyboard for ‘Deep Shit’.

I think I did three versions of the story in board. One by hand, and two in flash – the program that became ‘Anime’ and was really great for digital ink drawings.

‘Deep Shit’ came out on Dvd, and so I had to design an interface and a cover.

‘Baby Doom Sings Money’ was made to convince the jury of the Dutch Film Fund that the technique i had in mind was actually possible (they said not and did not grand me the money for making Deep Shit). This is my first ever After Effects work, so be merciful. I had help by Rosto and Balder Westein, who knew much more of After effects than I did, obviously.

Basically, this is a clay doll that was taken apart and all limbs and parts were photographed from all sides. The photos were coloured in Photoshop and in After Effects I put all limbs together again in layers, that could switch on or off depending on the desired perspective. Of course soon after there were many options for rigging characters, and Deep Shit was only partially made in After Effects, but hey, at the time it was a good idea. A bit laborious though…

‘Baby Doom Sings Money’ was made to convince the jury of the Dutch Film Fund that the technique i had in mind was actually possible (they said not and did not grand me the money for making Deep Shit). This is my first ever After Effects work, so be merciful. I had help by Rosto and Balder Westein, who knew much more of After effects than I did, obviously.

Basically, this is a clay doll that was taken apart and all limbs and parts were photographed from all sides. The photos were coloured in Photoshop and in After Effects I put all limbs together again in layers, that could switch on or off depending on the desired perspective. Of course soon after there were many options for rigging characters, and Deep Shit was only partially made in After Effects, but hey, at the time it was a good idea. A bit laborious though…