Alexander Thompson: In so many words, fantastical storytelling is a very excellent insurance policy against the ravages of time.
Fables, myths, and fairy tales endure across an ever-shifting topology of cultural, social, and political tectonics because they speak to an innate, primal sensibility we all understand as an evolved storytelling species. These are the tales that dispense with the quotidian and embrace abstraction and allegory - elements like these are part of a very old, hard-wired vocabulary that will likely be understood for a very long time to come. This is an appreciation that came naturally to me as a youth and was later reinforced by deeper readings of Jung, Campbell, Marie-Louise Von Franz, Erich Neumann, and others, who lent academic credibility to the notion. They told me through their writings that this was the correct path to walk, that this was a good way to commune with future peoples.
In the case of Em & Selma, the setting evolved over the years. I first conceived and wrote the film nearly a decade ago, while living in the Southeastern United States. The 1930s backdrop was always a mainstay as it was a time of major historical flux in the world, this short tense pocket of uncertainty nestled between two explosive world wars. A pressure-cooker era like that made sense vis-a-vis the themes I wanted the film to speak to - generational divides, the death of an ideology, that sort of thing. Had I been able to shoot the film then, it would have been imbued with a more Appalachian flavor, a Southern Gothic sort of essence I suppose that informed the dialogue and characterizations of earlier drafts. I spent some time scouting the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina in the hopes of shooting there, but the film was tabled due to the sobering costs associated with doing it the way I really wanted. Just as well, as I was not experienced enough as a filmmaker at that time to do it justice.
Flash forward to late 2020. I’m now living in Los Angeles, and despite the pandemic raging on and the costs of making the film having only risen in the interim, I decided (with longtime friend and producer Roger Mayer and a small team of close collaborators from my short-time directing music videos) that it’s now or never and we’re going to move forward on this thing, so we price it all out, take a deep breath and roll up our sleeves. But of course, the cultural and aesthetic patina of Southern California is very different from Appalachia, and without being able to relocate production to the Southeast, I spent some time re-writing the film to reflect this new setting and cultural backdrop. In the end, this felt both appropriate and inevitable, and I think Dust Bowl-era California actually serves the story better.
I quickly learned to embrace the idea that Em and Selma should feel like characters right out of a John Steinbeck novel, or a sun-leathered sharecropper from a Dorothea Lange photograph. That all worked out nicely in the end, I think, and hopefully feels like a fresh and intriguing backdrop for a fantastical short story.
Milly Shapiro and Pollyanna McIntoshvia @Griffin_Hunters on X
NFS: What did the development of this story look like on the writing and planning side? This is a story with scope and quite a few creature VFX shots.
Thompson: The overall scope of the film felt just right for not only what we could afford to actually put in front of a camera, but for my own sensibilities as a storyteller, with due consideration given to the short film format as well. I love small-ensemble, chamber-drama character studies, the likes of which Tracy Letts, Samuel Beckett, Peter Shaffer, Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. really excelled at. I equally love the imaginative short fiction of writers like Ray Bradbury, who knew precisely how much information to give a reader in an abbreviated storytelling format so as not to clutter the landscape, if you will. Combining a small-brush-stroke character study with a suggested larger world or mythology as a bespoke backdrop, to me that is a very exciting and ideal balance of ingredients. Many of my future projects will explore this same basic suite of ingredients, hopefully, to increasingly successful results with age and experience.
Only a few elements of the draft changed over the years. Switching from Appalachia to Depression-era California was the biggest, but this informed dialogue revisions more than anything else, and a few changes to the visual language to embrace a more austere tone. There was one extra creature that originally popped up in the film, which would have been quite a gruesome spectacle for audiences, but I couldn’t fully justify its inclusion thematically, so it was nixed. This was just as well as the volume of VFX work the film did end up entailing was obviously quite enough already!
On that topic—the creaturely co-stars of the film—I have only ever been and only ever will be as interested in such elements insofar as they serve themes or underlying psychology of a character. I am not a technocratic filmmaker and while I am extremely proud of the work our mostly hand-picked team of animators, CG generalists, and compositors did here—and feel blessed to now call many of them good friends and inevitable repeat collaborators in the future—I hope the takeaway will not be that Em & Selma is a “Creature Feature” or that the VFX overshadow the more salient elements of the story. We carried this flame as long as we did because those elements were necessary for Em and Selma’s personal journey and growth as characters—Em’s especially—not because we wanted to strut our technological wares.
With that said, because we knew from the jump that the creature work needed to be of photorealistic caliber in order to properly immerse our audience in a fully lived-in world where such creatures feel ordinary or even banal, we planned quite rigorously ahead of the shoot to accommodate this aspect. I had a full shot list drafted during the initial scripting phase and then worked across countless Zoom sessions with a very excellent storyboard artist, Eliza Roberts (a long-time collaborator who also designed several of the specialty props seen in the film) to board every shot. I then took her boards and cut together an animatic with temp music, sound effects, and even some embarrassing V.O. work I did myself in order to mock up the entire film, first frame to last. This was a painstaking process but utterly crucial so every department head could understand what each shot needed to communicate and so our VFX team could prepare for any requisite challenges downstream, including the biomechanics of what we needed the creatures to be capable of doing, physically. By the time our wonderful editor (Jordan Taratoot) got his hands on the footage, picture editing was largely a matter of over-cutting this animatic with the corresponding footage of choice takes. We tried to leave zero margin for error.
NFS: Why did you go with black and white?
Thompson: Black-and-white has a historically unique relationship to the short film format. I think of amazing short-form work from Guy Madden like The Heart of the World or flagship mini-masterpieces like La Jetée, Un Chein Andalou, Robert Enrico’s adaptation of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge… B&W has a special kinship to the medium. Once upon a time that was mostly a budgetary consideration since color film stock was more expensive for neophyte filmmakers, but the association runs deeper than that for me. Short films are, broadly speaking, a filmmaker’s medium, virtually never commercial enterprises. They are often the most raw and honest work a filmmaker ever undertakes, when he or she is unfettered by downstream considerations of commerce or audience expectation.
In Em & Selma’s case, director of photography Scott Siracusano and I wanted every frame, especially wide landscape shots early on, to evoke Ansel Adams photographs brought to life or scenes from a Béla Tarr film that just so happened to co-star mythical creatures alongside a weary cadre of morally-grey human beings. I was so intrigued by this contrast of high-end visual effects integrated seamlessly into a restrained arthouse filmmaking sensibility, two aesthetics that virtually never cross paths, and since I had no one to be answerable to except the film itself, I stand by the decision and believe the film is richer for it.
NFS: How did you communicate your vision for the creatures with your team?
Thompson: From the jump, our mandate with Em & Selma’s bestiary was total believability and naturalism, nothing less. It was very important to me that these creatures didn't read as “movie monsters” but functioning members of a lived-in and grounded ecology, with their felt life histories and evolutionary trajectories. This meant the assets themselves needed to hold up to the scrutiny of extreme close-ups in broad daylight and lengthy takes, some of them as long as a full uninterrupted minute of screen time, and had to feel grounded within earthen physics and biology.
It was a really fun challenge devising answers to the questions that arose from these choices: What would a griffin look like if it were biologically plausible? How about a fairy or wood nymph? Working with lead creature artists Gabriel Beauvais and Gregory Strangis well before the shoot, we spent a lot of time drawing from real-world reference points in nature—everything from tree frogs and primates for the wood nymphs and diverse megafauna, diverse like camels, hyenas, cassowaries, flying foxes and prehistoric synapsids for the griffins—not only delving into a fictional evolutionary history for each animals, but also making sure the biomechanics worked within the narrative parameters of the story and the shots we were contemporaneously storyboarding.
Female variation on the "Wood Nymph" creature. Sculpt & look dev by Gabriel Beauvais, based on an original design by Mike Luard.via Indiegogo
I threw a few fun extra challenges at the CG team. In nature animals are often sexually dimorphic—males and females have notably different physiological traits. Compare a female duck’s earth tones to a mallard’s colorful plumage as one example. This meant the male griffins and the female “queen” griffin, who anchors the males in a small breeding pride or harem, had to look considerably different because they occupy different ecological roles within their environment.
It helped thematically to have the queen be very different from the males as well, for reasons I don’t hope to spoil—again, all these choices return to serving our thematic bedrock. But this also meant that nothing across the various CG assets could be copy-and-pasted per se, everything had to be done from scratch—no shortcuts were permitted.
There were budgetary considerations too, of course. I was advised early on that feathered plumage, which I had always envisioned covering our griffins, would break the bank and bring huge downstream headaches since every shot would require simulation.
That wasn’t tenable with our budget, so we looked at large bat species to see how a large-winged animal’s groom might look and behave with sparser and matted fur and membraneous wings instead of a bird of prey-type configuration. Mother nature always provided further inspiration when we needed it. I hope these help make “our griffins” feel like a fresh and grounded take on a classic mythological beast.
A close-up on the "Male Griffin". Design, sculpt & look dev by Greg Strangis.via Indiegogo
Animation was by far the longest and most exacting part of the post-production process. It was such a treat getting to work with a small but international team of highly gifted, experienced animators, across hundreds of Zoom calls at all sorts of crazy hours (every time zone accounted for except my own!) over the past few years. The expressiveness and believability in each creature’s performance had to be such that you could imagine David Attenborough or Jacques Cousteau intoning poetic narration behind them and you’d be none the wiser.
It became an all-consuming obsession to imbue each shot with all the little quirks you’d expect from a real breathing animal—not unlike working with an actor, but across a distended timeline. The animation team did a unanimously excellent job rising to meet this challenge. While it was a very laborious process to get all 100-odd creature shots executed to the standard we all wanted, I do not regret one second it took to achieve that goal, and I feel so blessed to now call many of my collaborators on this film good friends who I cannot wait to work with again - hopefully with a more sane schedule and pipeline next time around.
Special effects obviously do not a good film make. I know this. But I feel incredibly fortunate that we were able to push the creature element of the film as far as we did, with the means that we had. It was such an enjoyable and rewarding part of the process, watching these beasts I’d dreamed of for years and years slowly come to life in the hands of such gifted artists, who really bought into the dream and obsession with me.
This film belongs to them every bit as much as it does me or anyone else involved.
NFS: You had great performances from Milly Shapiro and Pollyanna McIntosh. How did you direct them to interact with creatures not there during filming?
Thompson: Despite all the prep work, casting actually came together very late in the game, and there was virtually no time for rehearsals or meaningful scene work due to scheduling factors and COVID regulations of the day (remember, this was early 2021 when we actually shot the film).
Thankfully Milly and Pollyanna came to the table with a keen understanding of the themes and what we were hoping to express through the characters, and of course, we also had the full animatic to share with them. In lieu of the time we’d normally want to dedicate to rehearse, I sent them a lengthy document that broke down Em and Selma's family genealogy and history, a sort of manifesto of what the ritual of the hunt meant to both of them personally, second-order character details like that which I hoped might give shading or nuance to choices on set.
It was also filled with emblems I hoped may put them in the headspace of Dust Bowl-era people—things like Dorothea Lange photos, Thomas Hart Benton paintings of scenes out of Grapes of Wrath, and all sorts of esoteric and atmospheric marginalia like that. Did it help? Only Milly or Pollyanna can say! But it was a fun exercise in providing detailed pretexts where time otherwise did not permit.
By the time we shot the film, the creature assets had largely been finalized, so we knew the exact real-world dimensions. That allowed our incredible production designer, Phil Salick, to fabricate huge Styrofoam prop heads for the griffins at the correct scale, so Milly and Pollyanna had precise eye-lines while we puppeteered the heads on set (I admit there are a few shots—I’m not saying which!—where we digitally rotoscoped and re-painted eye-lines to be even more accurate, post-animation).
NFS: For other indie filmmakers wanting to do VFX work, what's your advice for getting the most value out of a limited budget?
Thompson: Managing the VFX pipeline on this film was such a humbling experience for this relative technological luddite and a real baptism-by-fire. Be open-minded and ready to learn, and expect the technology to evolve in real time before your eyes. Embrace this and be willing to shift plans a bit as reality intervenes.
Pick and choose battles carefully. Lean into the resources you know to be at your fingertips, not the ones you wish were there but aren't. I learned this in my short time as a music video director and it was a good primer for an undertaking like Em & Selma.
Know a great stop-motion animator who’d be willing to work with you on something to help build out their reel? A good traditional cell animator? Someone who is a total genius with clever, invisible compositing work, amazing make-up effects, or miniatures? Fantastic! Write ideas around the skillsets of those collaborators, or your own for that matter.
That statement extends well beyond the domain of visual effects of course—know an actor or actress who is a brilliant reservoir of untapped talent and inspiration? That's a great special effect right there. Use them!
NFS: Is there anything you'd like to add?
Thompson: It took a small army to get this film airborne, and among them, an even smaller entourage who stuck it out beginning to end with me. They know who they are, and I will forever be indebted to their hard work, friendship, and willingness to endure those birthing pains alongside me. I know all too well that the end product is a far cry from perfection, owing largely to my frank inexperience as a director and leader, but the film was a singularly transformative undertaking and I am very proud of what my team accomplished with relatively threadbare resources.
I hope audiences will find something to resonate within our strange little coming-of-age fable about mother and daughters and the beasts they hunt. Whether we did the story and themes justice in the execution, whether or not this toiling bore fruit—that’s up to them to decide. If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll want to show up for the next one.
Milly Shapiro and Pollyanna McIntosh
Female variation on the "Wood Nymph" creature. Sculpt & look dev by Gabriel Beauvais, based on an original design by Mike Luard.
A close-up on the "Male Griffin". Design, sculpt & look dev by Greg Strangis.
