Behind the Work: A Cathartic Slice of Surfer Noir

July 16, 2026

Director Kirby McClure tells LBB’s April Summers about turning memory into cinema through a deeply personal blend of hand-drawn art, motion capture and AI.

 

Created by director Kirby McClure, better known as Radical Friend, the animated short wasn’t conceived as an exercise in exploring artificial intelligence. It began as an attempt to revisit a place that no longer exists. The rain-soaked, decaying Florida beach town where he spent his teenage years. With every location hand drawn from memory, and every character rooted in reality, Kirby used AI-assisted motion capture to physically perform each role himself. Then he composited those performances into his illustrations, creating what he describes as a hybrid of theatrical performance, hand-drawn art and emerging technology.