Yes - though I handle everything on the creative end, I tend to have a friend or two shoot or edit the projects. Certain projects also require the talent of voice actors. Nobody, really - I get very little inspiration from other cartoons or even other films. I could list quite a few extremely talented people creating animated shorts, but if anyone, I tend to admire traditional feature films and directors. I never feel as though if a story is animated, it becomes a separate can of worms though.
Films are films.
We are already underway in production on the very next short, while I am writing and working on getting a feature project off the ground. And Bitter Films is constantly updated, my never-ending playground for new ideas. I don't have a DVD player and haven't seen them yet but thought it was cheap and silly of the producers of those discs to just transfer the films from the standard video masters without bothering to remaster the film digitally for highest quality. And don't get me started about that unauthorized audio commentary. I still think the volumes are worth investing in as they contain many other excellent short films aside from Hertzfeldt's wonderful work.