Vote for a better future!
Some films age well. This one, we wish, hadn’t.
Vote! for a Better Future is a short film Arne made during his time in California — and when he made it, it felt urgent. Looking at the world right now, it feels even more so. That’s not something to celebrate, but it is something worth talking about.
California, 2019
Arne was in the Bay Area working at the legendary Tippett Studio in Berkeley — the studio behind some of the most iconic creature effects in cinema history — where he was part of the team on Phil Tippett’s long-gestating masterpiece Mad God. Every day he’d bike to work. And every day, he’d pass the tent villages that had spread across the streets of one of the wealthiest regions on earth. The contrast was impossible to ignore. Immense wealth on one side, profound homelessness on the other. And at the same time, the government was rounding up undocumented people from their homes and placing them in detention camps.
There was so much social injustice all around him that he had to do something. So he made a film.
Made in Spare Time, With a Corner of a Legend’s Stage
Phil Tippett — generously and graciously — gave Arne a corner of his studio stage to work on the project in his evenings. Working after hours, Arne built the film as fast and lean as possible without sacrificing the tactile quality that makes stop-motion feel real. The solution: H0 scale miniatures, the kind used in model railways, bought online. Small, affordable, and oddly perfect for capturing the miniaturized way society sometimes treats the people it fails.
Two of his Tippett Studio colleagues joined him along the way — animator Chuck Duke and long-time FX director of photography Jim Aupperle — lending their considerable talents to the project. The whole thing came together over about a month of evenings.
After Arne moved back to Germany at the end of 2019, Jonathan Howe from Tumult Kollektiv stepped in to handle sound design — and by all accounts, brought the film to life in a whole new way.
Credits
- Direction, Animation & Set: Arne Hain
- Animation: Chuck Duke
- Director of Photography: Jim Aupperle
- Sound Design: Jonathan Howe / Tumult Kollektiv
Why It Still Matters
Vote! for a Better Future was always more protest than production — a personal response to what Arne saw around him every day. It was never meant to be a polished commercial piece. It was meant to say something. And the uncomfortable truth is that everything it was responding to — homelessness, detention, inequality, the slow erosion of basic decency in public life — hasn’t gone away. If anything, the volume has been turned up.
We’re proud that this film exists. And we hope, one day, it’ll feel like a document of a time that has passed rather than a mirror of the present.