to wait until he was paroled. Meanwhile, he made the short film The Horse. When the university insisted he make his thesis film with or without his first-choice actor, Burnett cast Henry Sanders. Directed by Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep was shot in Watts on a budget of less than US$10,000 ($38,000 in 2016 dollars) over roughly a year's worth of weekends in 1972 and 1973, with additional shooting in 1975. In 1977, Burnett submitted the film as his Master of Fine Arts thesis at the School of Film at the University of California, Los Angeles. Burnett said he also intended to make the film a history of African-American music and filled it with music from a variety of genres and different eras. Burnett also kept a stable job while Killer of Sheep was being shot, spending his time working at an agency reading scripts and synopsis. Roof jumping scene One scene contains a low-angle shot of children leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Juliet Clark, a journalist writing for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, said the scene shows how children in the film "seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders". In 2009, a still from the scene, showing one of the boys mid-jump, was reproduced in red tint and used as the cover of rapper Mos Def's album The Ecstatic. According to Complex magazine's Dale Eisinger, the "subtle and still-moving" cover has a "hazy, dream-like movement, appearing as a non-narrative, loose collection of vignettes that are tangentially fascinating and incredibly powerful", while reflecting the ideas of cultural justice and global inequality present throughout Mos Def's work. Critical reception Though the film won the Critics' Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was acclaimed at the Toronto International Film Festival, it never saw wide release due to complications in securing the music rights for the 22 songs on the soundtrack, which included such big names as Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, and Earth, Wind and Fire. It remained in obscurity for nearly 30 years, garnering much critical and academic praise and earning a reputation as a lost classic. The film did not win an award until four years after it came out, after having to wait four years to be released. Killer of Sheep holds a 97% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes; the consensus states: "By turns funny, sad, and profound, Killer of Sheep