Bob Sabiston Movies

Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.

Just moments before his third wedding, Zahedi relates with utter sincerity and astonishing candor his obsession with prostitutes. He retraces his romantic and sexual history, including his ideological commitment to open relationships, that led to two disastrous marriages and several very pissed off...

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.

In Grasshopper, park-bench philosopher AJ Vadehra expounds on astrology and more productive avenues of contemplation. Done all in grey-green, this animated but otherwise unedited interview is a good example of what happens when you approach the right stranger with a camera. Grasshopper premiered...

An animated short about recycling.

In this short film, filmmakers Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta accompany Ryan, a six-foot-tall, 13-year-old autistic boy, to a local convenience store to purchase a "snack and drink".

In 1999 we got a contract from ITVS to make a series of animated short documentaries in the vein of Snack and Drink. The twelve segments of Figures of Speech feature subjects interviewed in Austin and on the road between there and San Francisco.

Flat Black Films’ rotoscoping software was originally developed for an MTV contest. It is 34 animated interviews with random people encountered in NY’s Washington Square Park.

This is the first ‘independent’ use made of our “rotoshop” software. It was quite primitive in the beginning. This is a short road-trip documentary consisting of animated interviews with people found along the route from New York to Austin.

Color test for animation by Bob Sabiston

Ryan Power is back and he means business. This second trip to Fiesta Texas is done ride-by-ride “just like last time.” Thrill to the psychedelic sights and sounds of a Texas theme park as you are slowly worn down by the implacable will of this young man. Ryan previously appeared in our short...

A robot plays the drums. An insect, bearing a familiar logo, buzzes around it.

A sinister flying pod crashes to Earth and unleashes a giant mechanical roach that attacks the city.

This abbreviated short, though never finished, got into Siggraph’s Electronic Theater for 1994. An early Bob Sabiston animated short

Ryan gives a tour of the Capitol in Austin, Texas

After Thomas Hooven graduated from medical school, his girlfriend of 12 years ended their relationship. It was only three weeks before they planned to marry.