making THE WiNGS
(this post is a pretty in-depth exploration of THE WINGS — the film i just released this week, and so it’ll obviously make a lot more sense if you’ve already watched it. if you haven’t, well what are you waiting for? HEAD TO THIS LINK!!!)
if i ever try to explain “my process” to people, it usually centers around the fact that making a film, for me, is a maddeningly iterative process. it requires stops and starts, total rewrites, many, many panic attacks, and miles of pacing back-and-forth in my room. i used to hate this, it made me feel like a bad artist –– to have put something down for months at a time, to not have perfect clarity the moment i start typing –– but i know now that that slow marination IS the process. it’s how i determine if an idea is something i want to actually pursue, if i don’t work on this for 6 months, will i keep thinking about it or will the idea fade away?
THE WINGS is probably the most extreme example of this process. i wrote the very first version of this in august 2019 almost deliberately to try and make a very simple, quick, silly film. and here, five years later, well...lol. this feels like an insane thing to admit about a 6-minute, limited animation film where, quite frankly, nothing really happens –– but it’s an admittedly insane little film, so perhaps that’s the only way it could’ve been made. over those five years, taking a new stab at what i kept calling my “dumb hockey movie” became a near-yearly tradition for me –– i would look at what i wrote a year prior, whatever art i sketched out, try to figure out what wasn’t working, how to fix it, and spend a week doing that before hitting another creative brick wall. so it’s surreal now to have actually made the film this year, to be releasing it today. and as much as i bemoan how many times i had to reimagine the film, how many rewrites and re-translations and re-designs it took, the process became a lovely little time capsule of how i’ve changed over the past 5-6 years.
conception
** SIDEBAR: it’s here where i should also clarify that, growing up in moorhead, mn (go spuds), i was a theatre kid in a hockey town, so the two things feel inexorably linked in my head. perhaps this is my most personal film? hmm. i’ll ask my therapist.
there is no evading the fact that THE WINGS is deeply, spiritually connected to LAST NITE AT SAM’S. they were conceived around the same point, most attempts to make THE WINGS happened as a direct result of getting frustrated with the pace of production on SAM’S, and both center on a “fight” between two men who are cogs in a violent world that they ultimately have no control of.
there are a few differences, of course (in THE WINGS, the SKINNY guy has the mustache!). in the earliest versions, this film was much more explicitly about the class-consciousness angle than anything –– about the absurdity of being penalized for fighting in a game about violence, about the lack of labor protection. the theatrical angle was a way to try and heighten the silly contrasts between a fast-paced, brutal sport, and the more meditative and semi-pretentiousness of theatre.**
the writing
↓ the FINAL RECORDING version of the script, MAY 2024
in the first iterations of the film in late-2019, it was more of a david-mamet-style play –– monologue-y and quite full of itself –– and the film’s theatricality stopped at the text itself. it was just about two players, talking to each other in a normal hockey arena as the game played on normally in front of them. suffice it to say, it never felt correct, but i couldn’t quite figure out what was missing, what was needed. did i just feel bad about the writing itself? (yes) did i feel like LAST NITE AT SAM’S was a more interesting attempt to grapple with similar anti-capitalist subject matter? (definitely)
i took a few stabs at solving those questions during the pandemic, but eventually in the lead-up to my move from LA>NYC in 2021, i decided i was going to go all-in on SAM’S and left THE WINGS in the dust while i frantically storyboarded and designed in-between packing my belongings into a prohibitively expensive U-Haul crate.
when the one-man production of SAM’S hit the 6 month mark in early 2022, i was losing my mind. i couldn’t quite gauge how much was left on that film, how much progress i was making, or what needed to be done, and so my mind began to naturally drift towards THE WINGS as a project i might be able to work on and (again, the hubris) bust out a quick, messy, finished film before returning to work on SAM’S. however, what happened as soon as i dug it out is that i realized i wanted to push the theatrical aspect of the film much further –– the referee would come out as sort of a “chorus”, the set stripped down, and an early monologue given by a player about a goalie’s carotid artery being accidentally slashed by a skate suddenly gave way to an interpretive dance that would underscore it. i liked this rewrite, but the self-seriousness of these monologues felt both precious and pretentious in a way i couldn’t seem to overcome, and while i developed a little bit of art for this iteration, i soon recovered my desire to charge forward with SAM’S and spent the next 6 months on a tear to finish it, putting down THE WINGS yet again.
a little bummed by the total rejection of SAM’S by all major film festivals, i started to noodle with THE WINGS again in early 2023, spurned on by my discovery that i maybe knew how to fix the pretentiousness issue...not by dumbing the film down, but by leaning in 10x as hard. let’s make it pretentious, let’s make the film a form of absurd, abstract theatre. and the more i thought about capital-T Theatre, the more it unlocked brecht and beckett and chekov, the more it unlocked the distancing effect i wanted to integrate into the piece. the words WERE important, but how do you balance the need to engage with the text in a way that retains the humor inherent in how silly and rough the visuals are?
i had spent years thinking about the film in the kind of midwestern sing-song fargo-accent that had colored my entire understanding of hockey kids growing up –– but why? hockey’s beauty is that 40% of the NHL is canadien, and some of its best players hail from russia, finland, sweden...i realized i had the solution to the problem, and it was SUBTITLES.
rewriting the film so that one character was french, and the other, russian, also unlocked a new element of the film that i’d increasingly wanted to explore –– history. specifically, as two languages that are deeply tied to the history of socialism in the 20th century, as well as the evolution of modernist theatre. of course, a problem remained ––
i don’t speak french. or russian. so i asked my dear friends mathilde huron and olga lexell, both of whom i met and befriended within leftist organizing circles in LA and also tremendously talented artists, if they would be down to translate the film into each respective language. and they did! ...twice. this 2023 version of the film was close, but i still couldn’t quite get it into production, and set it aside until picking it up one more final time last april –– but i realized that the more i thought about it, the characters’ dialogue felt SWAPPED, so i made some final adjustments to the text and luckily both mathilde and olga agreed to translate the film a second time.
in all honesty, i didn’t know at first if i would really take this version thru production or if it would just keep being put on the backburner. but i started to play with this one, cast the two players, and by then, i felt strongly that it was now or never.
design
the design of the film was not spared the winding process, in fact, it may have been the thing that changed the most during these multiple attempts. after all, there was an endless amount of questions i felt myself compelled to answer with each new iteration of the script: how do these characters look and what do they represent? how much does the theatricality extend to the visual design? should the environment feel like a real “set” as if they were on stage? should it feel like an arena that we’re treating as if it was on a stage? how do we approach lip-synch???
i tracked down some of the vis-dev work, so here are some of the more relevant/interesting aspects of that evolution...
← mortifying to look at this, a little loop i made in 2019 shortly after (probably) writing the first draft...you can see the very obvious design connection to SAM’S in the character designs, i’m not entirely sure why the last five years have led me to drawing eyes as far-side-esque brow ridges, but clearly it has remained a staple of my “style” for a little while now.
there was a bit during one of the early monologues where a guy got checked against the boards and flattened out like a pancake, which quickly went away though i found it really stupid and silly (compliment)
↑ part of the 2022 attempt, i was playing with design styles reflective of both the UPA films and WPA theatre posters, but it never really felt correct. though the referee design retained this style all the way to the finish line (goal line?).
↑ as the piece became more derived from absurd theatre, i researched constructivist soviet theatre and became deeply inspired by how they were building sets, this kind of total representative abstraction. i began to play with this a bit, adding jail-cell-like-bars behind them, and even machine gears... but it quickly went off the rails and just distracted from the two players. but in the third design we’re REALLY starting to approach what the finished “set” looks like.
here we see the first designs that are ALMOST there, from early 2024 when i started calling out for casting. i kind of miss the french guy’s squirrel teeth from this one. →
← i really liked this design style, but i couldn’t quite square it with the direction the set design was going.
↑ the final character designs ended up being kind of an in-joke with myself –– i decided the french guy, this overly-serious, less aged diva, should look like daniel day-lewis (note the there-will-be-blood facial hair), and the russian guy, this older but massive and soft-spoken presence, should look like marlon brando in apocalypse now. i realized i could build their “hairlines” into the helmets and tbh, i’m still hyped about that, even after all these months.
← i had animated most of the film by may 2024 but felt like i still hadn’t quite cracked the background design fully...something was missing, it felt too much like SAM’S and i didn’t feel like the text was doing enough to suggest the soviet-history angle by itself. over the course of one night, i watched basically every film of fyodor khitruk (one of my favorite animators of all time, certainly the greatest filmmaker the USSR produced) and realized that it might look cool to use collage for the spotlights and boards.
i took old scans of various propaganda from the early days of the USSR, as well as the mai 68 movement in france and used them to add texture into the players’ respective scenery, and changed a shot during the french character’s monologue to directly use photographs of mai 68 protests as he moans about “these young guys.”
storyboards, spurious decisions
despite being a film that consists almost entirely of two guys sitting and talking, in order to eventually create each and every shot, there are a lot of directorial choices that were made (and a million that were discarded).
the pacing of the shots, the setup of where the “camera” is, they are virtually all pre-determined in the storyboard stage. but that doesn’t mean there are not a lot of decisions made after this stage. aside from my sped-up english voiceover that i put in this animatic in order to try and replicate the pace the characters would eventually go at (i hadn’t yet recorded the actors when i edited this together), you’ll notice a key part of the film –– the singer –– is missing entirely.
that idea came soon after, as i watched this animatic with my head in my hands, and spent day after day chugging coffee and trying to figure out how to fix a film that seemed to lack an emotional core...
thumbnails as i worked out how to tie down including the singer
tasked with tying the film and its varying threads together, i decided to take a leap, and asked my friend stacy grinberg (who plays and sings in the great bkln band dátela darling, you should check them out) if she’d be willing to sing the anthem of the Soviet Union (“L’Internationale”) in Russian. in a massive stroke of luck and generosity she agreed without hesitation, and without her help and that character, i don’t think the film works anywhere near as well –– if at all.
that character is, to me, a shred of memory –– a representation of nostalgia, of youth and energy and revolution long dormant. and more than that, it helps the film’s keep the hyper-theatrical structure from feeling too stale, and boosts the sad irony of the film’s final shot.
first sketches…bottom right very quickly cohered into the finished design
animation
THE WINGS is, without question, the most i’ve ever allowed myself to lean into limited animation. and though that may seem like it would make things easier, i think it made everything MUCH, much harder in general. the more you limit, the frames and motion you do show take on an outsized importance.
this approach, though difficult, is by design –– i wanted to make sure that any viewers don’t get caught up whiplashing between looking at the captions and looking at the animation, that it lets you know the subtitles are the majority of the movie, that the actual characters will be largely static. the compositions are still important, the design and mise-en-scene are still important, but they all are in total service of the words being spoken.
originally i had set out to try and basically animate the film entirely in may, but between a freelance job that escalated out of control and an impending move across the country, that didn’t materialize –– hell, even when i’m in the final stages of making a film, it’s still an iterative, stop-and-start process.
after the aforementioned move, and a few hectic weeks of getting back on my feet in LA, i wrapped up animation and started in on the very final step –– editing it all together.
pulling it together (composite + editing + sound )
what was left, then, was a lot of tiny incremental progress over the next few months –– compositing shots, adding in additional texture to give the film some extra life, and editing until my brain hurt. 24 frames per second should mean that a single frame or even two or three is imperceptible, but make a mistake –– cut too early, too late, mix continuity –– and you WILL notice it. every. single. time.
i sent various rough cuts around to friends for feedback and they were lovely and extremely helpful at pinpointing what was working and what wasn’t. i screened a mostly-finished rough cut at a GUTTER show in bushwick in october, which was lovely for multiple reasons, not least of which being that a live audience really helps you figure out what aspects of the timing are correct and what parts need to be massaged a tiny bit more.
and while the shots were designed with subtitles in mind, it still took a bit of time to figure out how to display them consistently across the film.
BASIC COMPOSITE (ANIMATION + BACKGROUNDS)
FINAL FRAME (COLOR GRADE + VIGNETTE + GRAIN + SUBTITLES)
← early cuts had the subtitles kind of follow the characters to guide your eye...but i felt like it didn’t work across the board, and keeping them consistently in the bottom center was, counterintuitively, the best and easiest way to keep the viewer looking in the right places. trust the composition.
the soundscape is relatively simple (especially compared to the ProTools nightmare that was SAM’S...), but there’s a lot of tiny flourishes in there to give it the proper heft. i added a bit of reverb and room tone to help create an Empty Theatre vibe, recorded knives on cutting boards to to replicate the sound of ice skates, and after trying a more naturalistic foley for the players’ movements...decided to borrow a technique from the beginning of one of my favorite movies, vera chitylova’s DAISIES. i loved how unnatural the creaking, squeaking machinery noises felt in contrast to the naturalistic speaking voices, and that they helped to reflect that the two penalized players are aging, rusty cogs in a machine, already well on their way to being replaced.
beyond...
and that’s...kind of it?
i gave the subtitles a subtle gate-weave effect so that they felt a bit more integrated with the visuals, added in a little extra grain, and, well here we are.
this is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of all that ultimately went into making this silly, weird, 6-minute film where two guys talk. and while it’s sometimes painful to remember all the hours and failures that it took to get to this finished piece, it’s a reminder to myself that art doesn’t follow your schedule, you follow it. it took five years to figure out what this piece wanted to say, and how i wanted to say it. it took time for me to have to dive back into reading plays and researching revolution. it took weeks of designing and animating things just so i could see if it worked or if i hated it and 99% of the time, i HATED it. but it got me closer and closer and closer until i didn’t (or at least, until i only hated it a reasonable amount).
i wish i could just set out to make something, make it quickly and easily, and then move on to the next thing. i always envied people who seemed to do that. but even if i could make something that way, i don’t think it would feel like my work in the end. i love my stupid, mind-numbing process because, frankly, it’s mine.
THE WiNGS is done. on to the next thing, however long it takes to arrive.