“The end of the world forces you to find meaning in the present”

The idea for Yearbook came to him when he was touring film festivals with his previous short film Wisdom Teeth, Britto explains. “I became overwhelmed by the amount of movies that are made every year. I realized that there was very little chance that anything I made would be remembered for longer than two, five, ten, fifty years. Yearbook was my way of dealing with that minor crisis.”

Britto extrapolated that crisis into a film about the end of the world. This is something he thinks about fairly often, he says. “But not in a negative way. It’s just interesting to think about what ‘it’ is all for if ‘it’ is going to end one day. The end of the world forces you to try to find meaning in the present, I think.”

As Britto describes the making of the film, it seems like his own work habits are remarkably close to those of his protagonist, who is locked in a little room all day on his own, trying to figure it all out. “I had a number of great people helping me with various aspects”, Britto hastens to say. “Alex Beekman helped with clean up, Alexa Haas helped with the design, and Brett Potter, Ben Cohen, and Lucas Leyva were all invaluable as producers. But in terms of animation the team was just me basically.”

So what would be the one thing Britto himself would want to save for eternity, if he were in his protagonist’s shoes? “I’d probably let it all fade into obscurity”, he says. “Except for maybe the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album. The aliens and robots of the future might enjoy that one too.”