Nanette Burstein uses animation to get inside her subjects' heads in the new documentary American Teen. Here, Über-nerd Jake imagines himself as a video game hero. All images © 2007 Paramount Vantage.

It ain't easy being 'teen.

That's the takeaway from Nanette Burstein's new documentary, a fly-on-the-wall look at a handful of high school seniors in the all-American Midwestern town of Warsaw, Indiana. After spending one year and a thousand hours of video on her subjects, Burstein turned to animation to get inside their heads. "I asked them about their fantasies, about how they wished their lives could be. Those thoughts became the inspiration for the animated sequences."

In those segments, interspersed throughout the film, star jock Colin sees himself as a cosmic b-ball player sinking a basket into the heart of a galaxy; cheerleader Megan pictures her dream college as a place of joy and harmony; Über-nerd Jake imagines himself as a video game hero, while bohemian outcast Hannah battles her horrific self-image. The wildly differing styles for each piece -- from scratchy cel animation to CGI to candy-colored paper-flat cut-outs -- were inspired by the kids' own descriptions of how they saw themselves and the world. "I took my cues from them," says Burstein, "so it would feel like it was coming from their imagination, rather than me assuming what they were seeing or feeling."

Burstein needed an animation company that could deliver a variety of styles. New York's Psyop studio connected her with its satellite company Blacklist.

Burstein was no stranger to mixing reality and cartoons. Her previous film The Kid Stays in the Picture made extensive use of photo animation via After Effects and Flash. "In Kid, we used a cut-out style. We separated the foreground and then pasted it atop the backgrounds to put moves or a blur on it. You can isolate anything you want that way, then move it to give it depth. It's much more sophisticated than pan and scan.

"Visually, we wanted to make it interesting to look at," she says of her documentary about Hollywood producer Robert Evans. "We wanted to make the storytelling larger than life and decadent, make it clear he was an unreliable narrator. We wanted it to be surreal -- not purely factual."

For American Teen, Burstein needed an animation company that could deliver a variety of styles; New York's Psyop studio came to her and producer Jordan Roberts' attention. "They had the most impressive reel I'd seen," she explains. "We didn't have a lot of money and I wasn't sure they'd be able to work with us. We showed them twenty minutes of footage we'd cut -- and they really fell in love with it." Psyop connected Burstein with their sister company Blacklist -- a boutique shop for more cutting-edge, newly rising talents headed up by Adina Sales, Blacklist's executive producer and founder.

Psyop works out of an anonymous-looking black glass-and-brick building in the heart of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a neighborhood that a century ago was home to an enormous community of Jewish immigrants. Today the synagogues and kosher butchers are all but gone, replaced by trendy bars, high-rise condos -- and outfits like Psyop. Sales' office is at the top of four flights of stairs that take a visitor past rows of workstations and staffers' desks. Two of Psyop's artists are taking a break from their computers and enjoying a game of tabletop soccer set up in the middle of the studio's ground floor, and every day seems to be "take your dog to work day" -- several people are heading out the door with their pets for a mid-afternoon walk.