Beau McCombs talks SHANLEY at the NYICFF 2026

Beau McCombs with his friend in the background at the SVA theater

I was talking to Beau McCombs at NYICFF a day before I knew he was the director of the film SHANLEY. We were mirrorring each other at screenings and just saying hey and comparing notes as we went. I thought he was just another crazy festival goer and not a cinematic genius. 

Beau is an awesome guy. At some point I want to sit down in a diner and just talk movies and such because the little bits of conversations we had were both enlightening and wickedly funny. He is very aware of a lot of things and these little gems keep leaking out.  He is a talent that is going to go far once he is discovered by a wider audience. (How good is he? When SHANLEY his NYICFF short showed up before SPACE CADET the audience of young festival goers exploded with delight. The kids had seen the film in Shorts One over the previous two weekends and loved it- and said so out loud)

What follows is a transcription of most of the interview I did with Beau following the first screening of Shorts One at NYICFF. I say most because their were issues with the recording (the audio recorder which is good at cutting out background noise was testy so I did it on video and the camera picked up every sound. I also fumbled more than usual being thrown off by the technical issues) and some of it wasn't well recorded. I want to sit down with Beau and do it again.... and laugh hysterically at his jokes.

I want to thank the NYICFF for bringing SHANLEY and Beau to New York. 

Follow Beau on Instagram here:

Beau's You Tube Channel including SHANLEY is here.

STEVE: Where did this come from? I It's like Looney Tunes. Where did the inspiration for the humor come from?

BEAU: I think I did watch a lot of Looney Tunes growing up, and Animaniacs, and You Can't Do That on Television. So a mix between Disney, the kind of fun, light, and Nickelodeon, which is generally a little bit more mischievous.

I spent a lot of time by myself when I was a kid, and I would just entertain myself by just praying in the woods by myself and creating characters, and the characters just kind of come out and show up in a way that are kind of unexpected. You know, Shanley and his mom and dad are very much just kind of out of nowhere.

I just wanted the mischief just to escalate and escalate in terms of, like, things that you're not supposed to do in a really nice dining room. And so I just built a really pretty dining room. It was like, how can Shanley mess this up?

What's the worst thing that can happen here?  I didn't set the room on fire. I couldn't, that would have been taking too far, but yeah, just general mischief.

STEVE: No, you say Animaniacs, and that makes perfect sense. Now, the perspective of the set is something I've never seen before in an animated film. Where did that come from?

BEAU: The story just started developing more and more, and so instead of it being 30 seconds, it turned into three and a half minutes. So, you know, it was strange. I've never done a film that way. I never animated that way before. It was always lots of different shots, but something about just having a little stage was a little bit more of a challenge. Because I've never directed a play before. No cuts, just letting the action develop on its own, and seeing if I could make an emotional story that people could resonate with without moving anything.

STEVE: What sort of films have you done before? Because you're saying you haven't done animation like this before. Do you do animation? Do you do live action?

BEAU: I was doing visual effects for a lot of my own films, and then I got into motion graphics, and that eventually led to me starting to animate characters. And it wasn't until about two years ago that I just really took a crack at animating characters. This is my fifth animated short, and I've done a number of different styles.

STEVE: Are your other films online? 

BEAU: They are. I've got a channel called Nonsense on YouTube, so if you go to YouTube and type in Nonsense and Shanley, I don't have a huge following right now.

STEVE: You will. Don't worry, you will. This is good enough. This is going to go to a lot of festivals. Great, thank you. Trust me on this.

BEAU: Thank you, I appreciate that.

STEVE: What are you doing next? 

BEAU:  I'm currently co-writing a project called Dr. Hex and Badbot with a good friend of mine. Also going to be 3D animation about a scientist who builds a robot specifically to destroy the world. But he makes a mistake, and the robot can only do good. This giant, horrifying-looking robot only wants to do good. I'm working on kind of a spinoff of another one of my animated shorts about a couple of avocados that are teaching kids how to make a smoothie. I've got a puppet show coming up. All of this is part of the nonsense variety show. I'm trying to make kind of a variety show for kids, similar to Ka-Blam! You Can't Do That on Television. A little bit like Sesame Street, but maybe a little weirder.

STEVE:  Is any of this going to be features? Right now you're just shooting shorts and TV episodes?

BEAU: I only have the attention span for very short things. I've tried to write features. I've tried many times to write a big project. I think my DNA is just telling really tight little stories, sometimes really short and sometimes long.

STEVE: How long does it take you to do the films?

BEAU: This film, it took me three months, start to finish. The first month was modeling all the characters. The second month was, or then it was like about two to three weeks of just figuring out where the characters were going to be and doing a rough animation.

Right around then I had my cinematographer come and do all the lighting. It was a guy named Guy Freed. He's never done any 3D stuff before.

I showed him how it worked and he just figured out how to light it and it looks great. Half of the reason the film is what it is is because he came in and just made it look so pretty. Then the last six weeks was me animating for detail animation for all day, every day, like 10 to 12 hours a day for six weeks.

It was just me doing all the animation. Then sound design, which was the most fun, except I had to do all of the sound design by myself. All the footsteps are like my fingers on a table. Having to sync that up to their footsteps took a while, but it was worth it. 

STEVE: Do you always work alone? 

BEAU: When I'm directing things, you have to work with other people. 

In terms of this animation stuff that I've been doing for the past few years, I've just been making everything by myself.

STEVE: I talk to a lot of filmmakers and was wondering  Do you have a support? You have the guy who did the lighting and stuff. But do you have other peopleyou can turn to  and ask how do I do this?

Do you have guys you went to school with or guys you picked up along the way?

BEAU : I went to AFI with Guy Pools. I have other filmmaker friends that I can reach out to. A friend of mine, I reached out to him and said, hey, I'm having trouble with this story.

Can you help me break this down? Most of the 3D stuff, I'm new to it, so I'm just having to look at YouTube tutorials, just random, mad searches on the internet to figure out, hey, how do I make this thing stick to this? How do I texture this? How do I light this? Why can't I get this thing to work?

STEVE: Are you trying to stay with your own... The visual style of this is completely unique, as I said. I've never seen anything arranged like this and set up like this. What is influencing it? Are you going, this is all my stuff, this is the way I see it? Or are you pulling in influences from anywhere?

BEAU: This particular style, the way the animation itself was heavily inspired by the amazing E.J. Hassenfratz, who works at School of Motion. He taught a really simple tutorial on how to animate noodle-on characters, and I'm like, that's how I'm going to animate the film. If he hadn't done that, then I never would have been able to make this movie.

In terms of other animated shorts, they're all in totally different styles, just because I have a lot of different ideas that just kind of appear as different looks than I had. So this channel is my outlet to try a bunch of different things. Try telling stories in a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different visuals.

STEVE:  I like the simple style. You know Don Herzfeld? 

BEAU: Don Herzfeld. Yeah, oh my god. 

STEVE: because what I'm saying is, you're talking about the simple style, and all I'm going is, I can see you doing a parallel thing to his sort of stuff.

BEAU: That guy is a genius. The amount of time he puts into that is incredible.

STEVE: I can see you going down that route,  and making a mint and finding an audience that way.

Below is the Q&A that followed the first screening of SHANLEY following the screening of Shorts One. Beau shares the stage with Julian Alvarez whose film AHOY! played in the collection.