How This Dystopian Animation Examines Modern Warfare

Cody Healey-Conelly is a Brooklyn-based motion graphics artist who has worked on TV shows like Succession and Manifest. Cody is also a multimedia artist who often utilizes new technology to push the boundaries of the visual experience. Glitch Noir is a short film created by Cody Healey-Conelly through combining 2D scans of comic books with glitch textures, creating a visually unique dystopian animation. In the film, war has become automated and AI does what it does best – revolts. We have interviewed Cody Healey-Conelly to learn more about his creative process when he created the dystopian animation Glitch Noir.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

1. In your own words, can you tell us what Glitch Noir is about?


Cody: Glitch Noir is an animated story set vaguely in the future, in a paranoid world where warfare has been automated providing plausible deniability to the multinational corporations that finance and profit from weapon sales. The nameless protagonist sifts through the cracks and crevices of the global stream in a search to find the missing son of a client.

2. How did you come up with the idea? What was the inspiration behind the story?

Cody: The idea for Glitch Noir began to form around 2013 or 2014, after the United States had been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade despite political power changing hands in Washington. I began to question why war seemed to persist despite an increasingly connected society and the desire of most humans to avoid going to war. I began to think about the weapons manufacturers and contractors in the United States and how they have been enormously profitable for the past 70 years. Around this time, my interest in film noir movies and comic books peaked, coinciding with a new interest in glitch art. The result of these ideas and aesthetics is Glitch Noir.

3. What was the biggest challenge to creating the dystopian animation? How long did it take?

Cody: As an animator working alone, my biggest challenge was scaling down my ideas and script into a project that was achievable on a realistic timeline. The script I had written was initially much longer and more complicated and I had to consistently cut more and more while trying to maintain the concepts I wished to convey and retain an understandable narrative. The animation took about six months to make, with the bulk of the work being done in one month at Obras artist in residency program in the Netherlands.

4. What were your biggest takeaways from creating Glitch Noir that you’ve applied to your other projects?

Cody: My biggest takeaway from making Glitch Noir was that it was entirely possible for me to make seemingly “big budget” film ideas in my own way. I have loved science fiction since I was a child and have often made work in this category, but it wasn’t until I made Glitch Noir that I realized how accessible film making had become via various animation softwares, crowd-sourced voice overs and sound effects, and shareable 3D assets.

5. You work a lot with videos and projection. What draws you to that specific type of art form?

Cody: I developed an interest in photography from a young age. In high school and college, I often wandered around at night and in deserted areas making images. Eventually this led to making moving images. Animation has always seemed more approachable to me than traditional film making as the amount of resources needed is much smaller. As an animator, I can create an entire world without involving actors or sets. My interest in projection work grew out of a dissatisfaction with how people consumed video art on a screen, essentially viewing whatever image was on screen at that moment and then walking away if that image did not immediately captivate them. I wanted to take video off of a screen and put it onto an object, making it less recognizable as video art and bridging the gap between video and sculpture. This was done with the hope that video sculpture would cause a viewer to pause and parse what they are viewing, giving the video imagery more time to be consumed.

6. Who are your filmmaking inspirations? What films or TV shows had a profound impact on you?

Cody: My immediate thought when reading this question was Alfonso Cuarón. Thinking a bit more and I think of PT Anderson and the Coen Brothers. Video artists that have influenced me are Hito Steryl, Nam June Paik, Trevor Paglen, and Alex da Corte. Some of my favorite films include Children of Men, There Will Be Blood, Sin City, No Country for Old Men, and Donnie Darko.

7. What new technologies do you believe will change the way we tell stories visually?

Cody: It is very hard to predict which technologies will catch on and change the way we tell stories. Of course, new technologies will change how we tell stories, it just doesn’t seem to be a predictable thing as it’s subject to the whims of massive corporations as well as the whims of everyday people. Analyzing Beta and VHS, many would have bet on Beta but VHS won out in the end anyway. I think augmented reality combined with artificial intelligence has the most potential to truly change the way we tell stories. Imagine an AI that crawls your e-mails and social media and creates a custom narrative for you to live/play out with the assistance of AR?

8. What does art mean to you?

Cody: This is a question I have been asking myself for decades and increasingly so in the past few years. The best I can put it in words these days is, art is something I do as a means to interpret the increasingly bizarre world I seem to inhabit. I take these interpretations and turn them into images and share them with the world, hoping that someone connects with the work and that these images help them understand and make sense of that world a little better. At the very least, I hope my work can serve as a reminder to others that they are not going through this alone, someone else out there is feeling the same way they are.

Glitch Noir takes place in a paranoid world where warfare has been automated. It follows a nameless protagonist as he sifts through the cracks and crevices of the global stream in a search to find the missing son of a client. Watch the dystopian animation for free on Reveel.