It's Tuesday, which means it's time for a SHORT BREAK! Check back on the second day of every week for another awesome short film and a quick chat with its director.

The best short films don't just amaze and entertain, they also have a certain "something" that makes them stay with you. Certainly that's true of today's gem of a movie, which finds a perfect blend of badassery and romanticism while exploring the ever-pressing topic of PDA at carnivals. When it was released in 2007, "Rock Pockets" played at film festivals around the world, including the Bay's very own Frameline  and my then-employer AFI FEST. Since then, filmmaker Trevor Anderson has carved out a niche for himself in the world of short films with his hilarious, humble style of self-examination. He's Most recent film "High Level Bridge" was well received this year at Sundance and I hear rumors that Anderson's Edmonton, Alberta based Dirt City Films is planning something new soon...Promise to keep ya posted everybody!

Check out the film and then read my e-mail Q&A with Anderson:

The Bay Citizen: Music seems so important to both the origin and tone of this piece. What are we listening to? Did the songs come first, or the film?

Trevor Anderson: The film begins and ends with the intro and outro to the song "Girlfriend Boyfriend" by The Vertical Struts, which was a two-man rock'n'roll band I was playing in at the time. We went to the fair with Steven Hope and his video camera, planning to shoot a music video for our song. The video was just going to be our friend Nik and I walking around with our hands in each other's back pockets, one long tracking shot of our bums. Before we cut the video though, the band broke up. I was complaining to my friend Mari that I had all this footage and nothing to do with it, and she said, "Why don't you just put a voiceover on it and call it a documentary?" And that's how I fell, or was nudged, into personal essay-style filmmaking. I'm grateful too, because what would've been a mediocre-to-bad music video offers more to an audience when I share all that backstory.

TBC: The construction of the film feels simultaneously loose and precise, if that makes any sense. What was your editing process? Was it always going to look/play this way? 

TA: After we shot the tracking shot of our bums, we thought we were done for the day. We just hung around the fair and had fun, shooting whatever caught our attention - "Look! Ducks with sunglasses!"—but we weren't thinking it was for the video. Once we decided to use all that, I realized we had hours of footage and were in danger of cutting an overlong, indulgent edit. So, I wrote the monologue and locked sound first, and then we cut picture to the soundtrack, the way you cut a music video. This forced us to be disciplined with all that footage, and keep it economical. My housemate at the time was a drummer, and while I was upstairs writing the monologue, saying it out loud, trying to get it right, Scott was downstairs practicing his patterns and fills. I noticed that I could time the speech to work with his drumming and it just seemed right, free but tight, so I went downstairs and asked him if he'd go into Johnny Bolero's studio with me to mess around and create the soundtrack.

TBC: Your style of filmmaking occupies a unique middle ground between documentary and performance piece. How would you classify yourself? Who inspired you to take this route? 

TA: I like the term "creative non-fiction" and I was really inspired by a course I took in school on that subject. It was mostly personal essays and such, but I made a piece of theatre out of one of my essays and it changed the way I thought about making stuff. I really like the performance style that grows out of, you know, beat poets and bongos, but taken a little further. The concert storytelling of Laurie Anderson always grabbed me, and I like solo theatre shows, stuff like "The Fever" by Wallace Shawn, or the one-man shows of Daniel MacIvor. Spalding Gray of course. For sheer blow-the-top-of-my-head-off-ness, I'm thrilled by the theatre of Anna Deavere Smith (who, I understand, is coming to your neck of the woods this summer when she brings her show "Let Me Down Easy" to Berkeley Rep!)