Back in November, Alex Rollins Berg challenged everybody in the Filmstack community to shoot something. He encouraged folks to either create a short commercial for their Substack or to create something based on a provided prompt.
Then, in December, the baton was passed to Jon Stahl, who challenged the community to write something that makes someone laugh.
Well, I didn’t really do either challenge but I also kinda did both of them? Maybe?
There is this script I wrote over a dozen years ago, Racquet Club, and it is fucking hysterical. I developed the story with my friend Wesley then drafted it out as the first season of a web series — remember those? — in my free time between paying opportunities.
When I moved to LA after college, I workshopped the project with some funny artist-friends, then tried to get it made. I was young. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t get the ball rolling and eventually moved on to other projects.
The script sat on a shelf. Every so often, I would revisit it. It always held up, always made me laugh. Whenever I finished a project, I wondered if Racquet Club might be next. But it never made sense.
I love long-form audiovisual storytelling. I love collaborating with actors and cinematographers and sound artists and colorists and all the other folks who bring film scripts to life. I love being on set. I believe feature-length motion pictures are the seventh art, the apotheotic medium.
I respect all of these things enough to know they need money to be done properly. Not always and necessarily a lot of money, but enough money to be considered an “investment” for most people (myself included). My new movie, Lost Cause, is definitely an investment. I can neither afford nor justify another investment until that one is closer to breaking even. I don’t need to make money from my art. I just cannot lose money making it.
I was recently hanging with my buddy Sean M Starowitz who showed me some cool animations he has been making. Talking to him and seeing his work got me thinking about animation as a vehicle for my own storytelling. I asked myself, “if Racquet Club were animated, what style would best serve the story?” This required me to ask a much more fundamental question: what are the different animation styles? I spent awhile just going back and looking at images from all sorts of stuff I love: everything from Miyazaki and Chuck Jones to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
I came to a realization: the animated comedies I like usually don’t have particularly complex or detailed aesthetics. In fact, certain scripts work better with crude animation. Like, I think South Park would play worse if it looked like Spirited Away.
I considered the story of Steve Dildarian teaching himself animation to make Angry Unpaid Hooker, which became The Life and Times of Tim and ran for three seasons on HBO. I went back and rewatched some episodes. It looks like it was made by children, yet it plays like gangbusters. Or maybe, crucially, it plays the way it does because it looks the way it does.
With this mantra as my lodestar, I recently started learning animation with the ultimate goal of creating some version of Racquet Club to release slowly over the next few years. I’m excited to share with you the first footage I’ve created, which kinda maybe hopefully functions as a teaser trailer of sorts.
Two versions of the footage/teaser below: a 1920x1080 HD version and a 1080x1920 vertical version for Instagram (what an annoying aspect ratio but whatever). With the way I have structured my workflow, it is easy enough to create the horizontal version and then change the canvas to vertical dimensions and rearrange the assets so I don’t lose a ton in the flip.
If you’re gonna watch one, watch the horizontal version! Get that mis-en-scene.
Without further ado, here’s Racquet Club:
Vertical:
Happy holidays, everybody. <3
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