The writer/director/producer of the short is Jordan Michael Blake, who was kind enough to chat with us ahead of the festival. We asked about his process of putting the short together with stock animations in just a couple of months, and his advice for getting into festivals.
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No Film School: The story is surreal and deeply personal. How do you balance writing from an emotional place while letting things get weird?
Jordan Michael Blake: I think the structure or aesthetic of something should reflect the way your brain thinks about that thing, and from the beginning, this movie was about thoughts and feelings. So, I wanted to create an animation where thoughts and feelings were constantly coming at you or coming out of you, I guess because that’s how feelings feel to me.
I also just wanted to build a little world that felt nice to spend time in, because when you make a movie, you’re spending hours and hours immersed in it, and the movie really becomes the place where you’re living your life. I must’ve been craving a liminal space, because once I had time to reflect and be quiet with myself, all the personal stuff spilled out.
NFS: Did I see correctly that you used stock animations for this? What inspired you to go in that direction with your animation?
Blake: I come from a live-action background, and always edited my own movies, so something felt natural about using stock animation websites as if they were bins of footage.
I also had experience reappropriating existing film footage to tell my own stories, because I was part of an artist collective called Racer Trash that remixed feature films. Making things for that, and seeing what other people were able to make without shooting anything, was the direct inspiration.
After that ended, I was curious to see if I could take it further. And stock animations are so universal that it felt funny to run my internal monologue through such a direct and simple main character. I could write things like “I’m feeling kinda down,” and it’d make me giggle while feeling true at the same time.
NFS: A lot of animators might think they need complex tools to get into major festivals. What made you confident that stock GIFs could tell your story effectively?
Blake: I really wasn’t confident at all that it would work, but it seemed like lots of fun to try. Making the movie itself was a test to see if it was possible.
But the first thing that gave me any confidence at all to proceed was the aesthetic I created in Premiere: the hypnotic grain and the color. I accidentally made an optical illusion with the grain plates I was using, and it created a feeling of being sucked into the screen. After I did that, I could drop a GIF into the timeline, and it would suddenly feel like a movie to me. Not necessarily a movie you’d seen before, but it felt like something was cooking. It gave the movie a unified aesthetic, and I think that’s really important when you’re trying to make something with limited tools because it signals a lot of intentionality.
Paradise Man (ii)Courtesy of Jordan Michael Blake
NFS: Was there anything that was particularly challenging about this project? How did you overcome that challenge?
Blake: I had two months to make the movie, basically from scratch. So every day, I’d wake up and work as hard as I could for as long as I could. Then, at the end of each day, I’d think, “Well... it’s still not impossible for me to get this done in time. Guess I’ll keep going tomorrow.” Pretty much thought that every day until the very end, when finally I was like, “Man, I can’t believe it... but I think I’m going to get it done.”
It was truly a special kind of bender... I was eating well and making sure I saw friends and stuff because I knew I couldn’t afford to burn out. But also, I watched a ton of Suits. Anytime I needed to think about something that wasn’t the movie, I watched Suits. I overcame the challenges of making this movie by watching Suits.
NFS: You've had success at Sundance and SXSW. What's one piece of advice you'd give to filmmakers trying to get their work into festivals?
Blake: From my experience, you mainly just have to keep going, if you want to.
But a piece of practical advice? I guess I found there was a psychic toll of getting like 25 rejection emails a year, even when I was getting into a handful of cool festivals at the same time, so I made a choice to stop applying to so many fests. Fewer submissions meant fewer rejections in my inbox, which was good for me because those rejections had the power to mess up my day or mess up my creative energy.
I’ll also admit that I created a folder in my Gmail called “Emails From People Who F*cked Up Their Jobs,” and I still put festival rejections in there when I get them. It’s petty and definitely not true and immature, but it helps in the effort to “keep going.”
Paradise Man (ii)Courtesy of Jordan Michael Blake
