‘My Year of Dicks’ Episode 1 – ‘The Vampire’ (SXSW) – Non-Spoiler Review and Interview with Writer/Creator Pamela Ribon and Director Sara Gunnarsdóttir  

My Year of Dicks tells the deeply personal but wholly relatable story that many women have gone through; boys, life, and losing your virginity. It’s not just a beautiful story, but it’s visually stunning as well. Episode 1’The Vampire’ premiered at SXSW to much acclaim, even winning a Special Jury Recognition Award for Unique Vision in Writing and Directing. I had the chance to check out episode 1 and sit down with writer/creator Pamela Ribon and Director Sara Gunnarsdóttir, to talk about their creative process, and working on an all female project.

Bringing the Team Together 

One of the reasons this show works so well is because of the creative team behind it, and how well they work together. Pamela Ribon is not just a creative force now, but it seems she always has been. Her beautiful way of capturing human nature shines through in the story, and really captures the way that we all feel. Put that together with the unique and beautiful style of Sara Gunnarsdóttir, it’s a recipe for success.

The animation compliments the story perfectly, and really takes you into the world of Pam and how she is processing her emotions. The romantic internal monologue is something we’ve all done and continue to do, and to see it so expertly portrayed is both genius and genuine, and the animation is exceptional in how it captures what we all felt like at 15. 

How did you come to work together on this project? 

Pam: Did FX approach you with the scripts, Sara?

Sara: Yeah. FX… sent, he emailed me, I guess actually Jeanette who’s our producer had recommended me to him and he sent me scripts for two episodes, I think. So yeah, I read it and um, I gathered some photos and I did a couple of drawings and sent [them] back. This was like in June or something in 2020, And I really liked those two act episodes. So I sent this thing and was like, yes, I would love to do this. And then I heard nothing from them for like three months and I thought it was just like, oh, it wasn’t  gonna happen. Like they hired someone else. 

Pam: In the meantime, I had said, I want to work with her like this, this mix tape arrive from Iceland, some images that could have been ripped right from my diary. And I was like, this is a kindred spirit. But, even before, I didn’t even know that she had sent that yet. I had that art and said, oh my God, this is incredible. Like, this is stunning. It’s beautiful. It’s unlike something I’ve seen before. And it really taps into female intelligence and passion in a way that it just, I had, I was like, I want to see what this does when it’s trying to be funny. Wow. 

Sara: It’s true. I hadn’t really done comedy before. Not really like my, I did this, um, short documentary… as a graduation piece. And that had a lot of like irony or like hidden humor, I would say. But yeah, I haven’t really worked with humor for comedy. 

Pam: No, you, I mean to do it so well, because Sara’s got such a sweetness to her, like funny side too, that it’s almost like, it slides right in there with like, oh, I accidentally told a joke sometimes. Yeah. I love it. I love it. And yeah, we met and it was, it was, I don’t know. It was amazing right from the get go. 

Adventures in Animation 

I think the best way to describe the animation style is simple but complete. The more you watch it the more the detail pops out. There’s a strange nostalgia to the style even though it is incredibly unique. The nostalgic feeling of the animation compliments the story so well. While we’re offered an insight into the world of Pam, the style and the story offer an excellent mix that really takes us back into our own world when we were teenagers. 

I was gonna ask about the animation style because it is so unique and it fits the story so well … How did you settle on that design? What was it like bringing those characters to life in that way? 

Sara: So, I guess I am not what you would call a character animator. I just have, my background is like in art and then I have this MFA degree in experimental animation, which is like actually animation. So for me to come to something like this that has multiple characters that are on screen, or like Pam that’s always on screen and other characters that are always coming back. And, for me, like the only way to do this was to, use the resemblance of the actors. And all the actors, voice actors that we hired were fine with that. And Pam was okay with just us using her look, which was really perfect because I had such an easy access, like we were making this together. So we did, so we shot reference footage for everything. And for most of the boys, we were just doing it through zoom or like asking them to do something on their phone. And so stuff like that. But with Pam, we could just like shoot references with her all the time. And it’s really easy to just, so we, we treated the references very loosely. It’s like loosely rotoscope. So it was no problem for her to, to play herself 30 years ago. 

Pam: Also I’m stunning

Sara: And because we were all doing it, everybody in home, like we weren’t working together in a safe space or anything like that then, I really, my husband really came in strong because there’s a lot of, um, intimate touching things. So me and my husband just did references for all of it. 

Aside from the animation and the story, the pacing is also excellent. While this is just one episode of a larger, 5 part series, it works perfectly as a stand alone piece. This ties in so well with the personal, diary style of the series and how it connects with the audience.

It could work so well as a standalone piece, but I still want to see what happens next. Was that a conscious decision you made to make each episode its own thing? 

Pam: Well, they ordered five episodes for their season and because you’re proving out sort of a short season, I felt like they did need to stand alone in case you only ever got to see one, Like, it’d be very confusing if you saw four minutes in the middle of that. And also, I remember in early meetings with Jeannette that they had said FX my air them in any order. And even though I wanted, we wanted to feel that you went on a real journey from beginning to end, we were mindful that well, the genre needed to open and close too with the one episode. So it just sort of lent itself to that, opening and closing to set the mood too. 

The narration at times is this super romantic fantasy story. She goes into her own little fantasy world and the animation is so well matched to it. So how do you match them up together so well? 

Sara: I think what I find most interesting with, with animation is how easily you can just kind of leave reality. You can just go inside people’s head, like almost kind of literally. So I feel like that’s kind of like maybe a strong point where I come to, and I think something that drew me to the series is that this constant kind of being able to see what’s going on, but then experiencing it with her. And we are, we are aware of both of how she’s, how she’s seeing it. And sometimes she’s trying to convince herself. 

Pam: Yeah. I mean, it was the concept of the thing really was why animate this at all? And it was the ability to do that, to put fantasy and reality in the same place, in the same person. And to give you that, that feeling, I mean, we still, we all do it. Yeah. But that feeling of when we first started trying to like, be the narrator of our own destiny, and I think when you have a plan, as big as this year, I’m gonna lose my Virgin opportunity for, I mean, Pam doesn’t even really define why this year it’s just time, as far as she’s concerned. And, yeah, so she’s like her own hype man and the only learning material she’s had so far books and art house films and idiots 

That comes across so well in the piece. It is such a personal journey, but it’s so relatable as well. So, how did you go about writing this? 

Pam: Well, I mean, I, some of these, these are some of these letters I wrote when I was very young and I still have them and I had been performing them. So I kind of got the sense of like where to take that, where to take that fantasy, that it’s relatable and not into the like, oh, like someone should talk to her … And let me just say that in animation, I can go back to like, pushing way into the, like, no one’s gonna talk to her about this because you, you root for her. And so much of that has to do with, Sara can say she’s not a character artist, but she did like these, these are, I mean, these are, it might be my face somewhere in there, but this, these are these characters.. And they all have this same feeling of awkward vulnerability and they’re trying, and I think that is where the relatability comes in. Like, we’ve all, we might not have written a love letter that then we called them up and read to him over the phone, but we’ve all entered a party and gone, oh, I don’t know, how am I gonna, how am I gonna get through this? 

You do root for her all the way through, like you said, and at the end of this first episode I’m just cheering to myself a little bit, it was so perfectly, so perfectly done. Absolutely. 

Pam: Okay. And those are, I have to say, like that’s Sara there, I, I remember being like, I don’t know that she should get this big of a win. 

Oh, I’m so glad she did though. 

Pam: I Am too. Yeah, she’s right. Like it, that is where I had to, like, there were times when I was like, but that’s not what my clock looked like, poor Sara. And she was like, okay. But some of these moments, she was like, Hey, we have to like, leave what happened. And we have to give this thing an ending that it needs. And she definitely pushed things into the, the bigger cinematic feel endings of like that. Perfect fucking –  excuse me – that perfect moment. And I would be nervous to do that. Right. Which is funny is we have the opposite feeling on titles. I’m like, I wanna read my name. And she’s like, oh, it’s so out there. It’s so like, we did this. So our insecurity certainly came into play with each other in a way that I like, we really, she really, she just made me see storytelling in such a bigger, beautiful way. I really appreciate that. 

Sara: Thank you, Pam. 

Pam: We get to like really vulnerable. I mean, this is the kind of stuff, if we’re being very honest, I cannot, I always thought someone was gonna stop us as, at some point. Right. 

And this is where we see the icing on the cake. Not only is this a beautifully simple and creative way to really capture a memory that is so universal, it is a completely female led production.

Making Waves

The world of adult animation is a mostly male dominated industry. To see a major network invest in an all female production, whilst also giving full creative freedom is refreshing, and brings a completely new perspective. We see a story that women around the world know all too well, and bringing this new voice to a wider audience with such liberty is a big step.

Sara: It was, it was actually kind of wonderful because, just first of all, to get a chance to do a little show, like something that’s not just like two to five minutes to like, be like in animation, 25 minutes material, it’s like a lot, it’s like a big deal. And it’s, adult animation, that’s completely female driven and made by women completely. And like, I don’t know about anyone else who gets to do this. I feel like we all won something, yo get to make that. 

Pam: Yeah, absolutely. 

Sara: Cause yeah, adult animation is definitely been dominated by young men. For sure. 

As you said, it’s all female driven. It’s female created. So that is incredible in itself. And how do you feel about this for you… what’s it feel like to be coming into this boy’s club and killing it? 

Pam: [We’ve been in male] Dominated rooms and industries. So, it actually took me a while before I recognized it had been a minute since I had a dude say no to me in this project, we had just been forever. And because we did it during the pandemic, I hadn’t noticed, but it was, I didn’t have that concern that sometimes I’ll have of like, is this gonna work in this room? And I don’t, it felt very freeing to be able to know that we were all – everybody who came in was like, yeah, man, totally this, I have this feeling too. And I didn’t have to explain periods, explain how the Tampon works. Like I didn’t have to explain why he’s doing that to her. Or, you know, like everybody was like mmhhmm mmhmm mhhmm , and on any spectrum of sexuality, by the way, like we’re female or female identifying and we have some dudes and they were like, I mean, I may not – Everybody felt like we were coming back to help- I think a little bit- help our own inner selves in a way, 

Sara: It was also, for me, I’ve never worked, really in this way for a big corporation that FX really is. And I was kind of really surprised how they just said – here’s the money you asked for-  and we made it and then we delivered it. Like we, our contact at FX was awesome. 

Pam: To she, well, it was her idea really. Like she came to me and was like this book could be this thing… and all of our notes were on point. Like it, I think it came out conceived, but we couldn’t have figured out in 2019 or 18 when we first started talking about doing this-

Sara: but not once did it feel like a struggle with the network or like- everything was completely smooth. It’s just amazing. 

Pam: Yeah. They were extremely supportive. And they continue to be. So that helps too, that you don’t feel like you have to hope no one looks.  

An Ode to Our Teenage Selves

My Year of Dicks is a truly unique and special piece of art. It’s funny, relatable, and explores something universal. For a piece that is only 5 minutes long, it works so expertly in creating that link to the characters quickly and keeps you wanting to see more. A fantastic episodic premiere that can only lead on to an amazing season. It is highly recommended, and you definitely need to tell all of your cool friends about it!

My Year of Dicks Episode 1 ‘The Vampire’ premiered at SXSW. The series is set to air on FX. 

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