My first essay was about the 1998 film, “Pleasantville,” where I discussed the excellent cinematography, the awesome themes, and of course the shift from black and white to color. In each video, I intentionally named the wrong director which always sparked a wave of YouTube comments telling me I was an idiot, which I enjoyed.

Ultimately I moved away from satire to focus on sincerity—some audiences didn’t know what to think of “Sylvio,” my first film with Albert, presumably because they had seen my video essays and assumed “Sylvio” was a parody. In any case, shitposting online stopped being fun when it became a dominant and expected mode of discourse. And with Trump and the rise of social media algorithms, things got worse. Satire is much harder to pull off now with all the rage bait and bot infestation—when someone says something online today, it’s hard to see it as anything beyond an attempt to spark algorithmic engagement. And that’s if it’s coming from a real person at all, not an AI bot. (Apparently there are more bots than humans online now).

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to revisit these relics of a different time. I ended up making eight of these in total, which you can watch here. Paid subscribers can watch the “Pleasantville” video directly below and listen to some early test recordings I did when I was trying to figure out the tone of voice of the narration.

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Seemed fitting since our movie already plays with time, with certain scenes looping back on themselves. Of course it’s all very random, and nothing was planned, but it’s fun to see when things line up. Like when the fabric painting of the ship on the wall appears to be on the horizon of the ocean.

Or when Young Bella and Preble in a dream appear superimposed behind Old Bella and Preble in the real world.

Or maybe my favorite one, the first shot and the last shot lining up so the mansion is exactly where Preble is sitting in the pink room.

Paying subscribers can watch “Strawberry Mansion Forwards and Backwards” at the bottom of this post. Or if you’re more into physical releases, you can buy a (very) homemade VHS copy of the experiment. Only 10 copies available.

We’ve also uncovered two Strawberry Mansion hats. If you’ve ever wanted a SM hat, act fast.

Even more rare, we found two Strawberry Mansion shirts on a forgotten shelf in an office.

Head over to https://personhouse.bigcartel.com/ and get one before they’re gone.

This is our last post about “Strawberry Mansion” for the foreseeable future. In the coming weeks we’ll return to posting about “The Stone Balloon” and other projects. Paying members can watch Strawberry Mansion Forwards and Backwards below.

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On the flip side, there are some viewers who find the film a bit hard to understand. We certainly expected this as we fought to keep the story mysterious and the dream logic strong. But now that it’s been several years since its release, I thought I’d share some personal thoughts that could help clarify the story and some of our central themes, or at least communicate where our heads were at. In some ways the film is more simple than it may appear but there are still secrets and meanings that are not easy to decode upon first glance. Spoilers ahead…

Logic

Overall the film operates with a circular, metaphysical dream logic. Time and space are not rigid. Characters can change forms. They can turn into flies, comets, caterpillars, beets, and blimps. Hundreds of years can pass while Preble trudges through a never-ending snowstorm. When he reaches his destination, he hasn’t aged a day. Time can expand, contract, or fold in on itself.

There’s a scene in which Preble plays “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” on the piano. Of course, there is a line in the song, “life is but a dream,” and one may interpret the film entirely as a dream, even before we enter Bella’s or Preble’s subconscious.

Dream Tax

The premise is that in the future you are taxed on your subconscious thoughts while dreaming. Some viewers overthink this (I certainly did while developing the script), hoping for a simple explanation on how exactly this works and/or why it was put into place. A more conventional dystopian sci-fi film would include some sort of expositional montage setting up the world. But our film is more poetic and metaphorical than analytical and speculative. So while Albert and I had lengthy discussions on the nature of the dream tax, we landed in a place that it doesn’t really need to make complete sense. It’s not meant to be rationally dissected—all you need to know is that citizens are taxed on their dreams. Beyond that, it’s just a springboard to fantasy, adventure, and a relatively straightforward antagonist.

Taxes vs Ads

Some viewers have been skeptical about how Preble could be auditing dreams for the government and not realize that advertisers had begun to infiltrate them. It’s a fair question, but I believe he did know or at least suspect. Sure, when Bella says to Preble: “the ads they are transmitting into our dreams without us knowing,” he responds, “that doesn’t happen.” But I think he’s hiding in that line. He’s trying to continue to lie to himself. I tried to play Preble as furtively wrestling with the truth. Somewhere deep down, he knows about the ads and their corrosive effect. But refusing to acknowledge them makes life more manageable. Just like in today’s real world, our reliance on technology and hyper consumerist lifestyles could be killing our souls. But we either refuse to admit it, or feel we can’t do anything about it. Bella is trying to convince Preble to stop ignoring it. Even still, I think Preble can be seen within a duality framework, of someone who both believes and doesn’t believe.

Preble / Jim connection

One of the major secrets of the film is that our protagonist, James Preble, can be seen as an embodiment or reincarnation of Bella’s recently deceased husband. We never explain this directly but there is a passing reference to Bella’s second husband, Jim (aka James), who she calls “a dream”. Quite a few viewers have suspected or believed this; seen through this lens, Preble is both a government agent and a would-be liberator whose late life project with Bella was to expose the infiltration of ads in our dreams. If James and Jim are the same person, that explains why Bella summoned him to her home in the first place. So he could re-enter her life through her dreams, even after death.

Grass Man

The first time we see the Grass Man is in the “real world”: Preble is eating his Captain Kelly’s lunch in an abandoned mall parking lot. All of the sudden, he looks up and sees a standing heap of grass. Did he really see it, or was it a hallucination? It’s unclear but metaphorically significant. This is one of secrets I don’t think anyone has figured out: in the very first shot of the Grass Man, he emerges literally from the grass popping up between the cracks in the concrete—this represents the possibility of nature coming back to life after being buried by consumerism in an abandoned shopping mall parking lot.

Also, I see the Grass Man representing Jim, Bella’s second husband, initially a separate being from Preble. But as Preble begins to see the truth and succumb to it, he allows himself to transition into the Grass Man and sublimate with Jim.

Bella and Preble taking on different forms

There are many instances of characters taking on different forms throughout the film. It’s obvious in most cases but there are details that most viewers overlook. For instance, you can hear a fly buzzing around on the porch as Bella insists Preble take a lick of the ice cream cone upon their first meeting. This buzzing is Young Bella inhabiting the fly (as we see later more clearly), presumably plotting for an inter-dimensional way for Preble to return to his body. Later, as she and Preble are shooting through the sky as comets, she urgently suggests to Preble that the ice cream cone is the way home.

A bit later when we first enter Bella’s dream, a caterpillar crawls over her hand as she keeps a close eye on it. This can be seen as Bella keeping an eye on Preble, as when, later he treks for centuries to find her. (Another layer is the line in the ship narration, “he spoke of seeing a woman in a white dress whispering to a caterpillar in a field”). But she can only be found when Preble finally accepts and listens to his subconscious intuition. When he is buried under the mountain of consumer products, and near death, he flashes back to a moment earlier that seemed at first entirely illogical and thus he didn’t believe it. Now, he has a breakthrough—the voice of the talking fly (Bella) was instructing Preble how to save himself. “When all hope is lost, when you’re buried under everything, dream of me. And I’ll come to you.” In a half conscious state, on the verge of death, Preble finally believes—he thinks of Bella in that moment and summons her to save his life.

Rat Sailors

When Bella and her husband Jim were devising their ad-blocker helmet, they turned to rat testing for their scientific experiments. This is subtly suggested in the shot where Preble finds a rat skeleton wearing a tiny ad-blocker in Bella’s house. This seeps into the subconscious of Preble so when he is passed out in his nightmarish fever dream, he enlists the help of a couple of Rat Sailors (Marcus and Richard) who are ready to sacrifice their lives for him, as they sacrificed to be a test subject for Bella’s ad-blocker. “How do you know all this?” Preble asks Bella, in a moment of confused terror being chased by ads. “Because the experiments! The rats!” Bella replies. It’s a line that easily gets lost in the moment and thus most viewers often don’t make the connection.

Tape Man

One of the most mysterious characters in the film is the Tape Man. Who is he, and why are there dozens more like him? (They show up briefly in a vision walking in the field towards Bella’s house). The first Tape Man shows up after Preble wears the ad-blocker helmet to sleep for the first time and effectively gets rid of his personalized ad surrogate, Buddy. Thus, he represents a pure, uncorrupted dream life. The Tape Man also shows up in the living room of Bella’s house as it burns to the ground, signifying that Bella and Preble’s uncorrupted dreams will survive despite the house burning down.

Ending

The original script ended with a television news broadcast detailing the house fire and insinuating a burgeoning controversy with Peter, Bella’s son. Ultimately we decided against it because it changed the scope of the film in a way that wasn’t as exciting for us. There were a couple reasons for this: first of all, it felt like an overly conventional trope. Secondly, it felt wrong to introduce an outside world and media landscape after getting lost in such a poetic dream world. Thirdly, we didn’t want to suggest there would be an easy way to reveal the truth or take down the system even if he tried.

So while there is a line earlier that insinuates that Preble may attempt to reveal the truth if he survives—“if I didn’t make it back, Bella’s secret would die, and the ads in our dreams would just grow stronger”—it didn’t feel right for Preble to return the “real world” and immediately try to take down an evil corporation. Thus, there’s no final resolution to the secret about the ads, no scene where Preble exposes the truth to the masses. We went in the other direction to end on a more personal level. Perhaps suggesting the best we can hope for in this life is to stay lost in our own dreams and pure from corrupting influences. The question still remains: is this a happy ending? Do Preble and Bella end up together? Or is this just some VHS tape he can pop into his player to fleetingly get lost with Bella?

Paying subscribers can watch a deleted scene below where Preble has a bizarre face-off with Brian, Peter’s son, in the desert. Upgrade to paid subscriber now and you can watch this scene and we will also send you a Strawberry Mansion postcard. (DM us once subscribed with your mailing address).

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Here is the second part of our VFX breakdown for our movie “Strawberry Mansion”. If you missed part one, check it out here.

In our movie two characters turn into beets. Marnie Ellen Hertzler made two, large papier-mâché costumes for the actors to wear in front of a green screen.

The footage ended up looking kinda silly so during the edit we realized they should have real beets for their bodies. I went to my local supermarket and bought the biggest beets they had and we filmed them in front of a piece of green paper.

Then we filmed an out of focus background on my dining room table. This was filmed eight months after we had filmed the original dinner scene. Since it would be out of focus we knew it wouldn’t have to match the original scene perfectly.

Then we gave all of this footage to one of our visual effects artists, Matt Lathrom, who put it all together into the final image. He used the footage we had shot of the actors wearing the papier-mâché costumes and replaced their bodies with real beets.

At one point our main character, James Preble, falls from the sky into the ocean. We filmed Kentucker sitting on a green block in front of a green screen and he pretended to be falling.

We wanted to film underwater as he crashed into the ocean but we ran out of time. I found some jellyfish footage I had filmed years earlier at an aquarium so we used that to bridge the gap between sky and ocean. In the edit we discovered that the jellyfish tentacles made for a nice dissolve into Bella’s hair blowing in the wind.

The pink room, made by production designer Becca Brooks Morrin and art director Lydia Milano, is one size for most of the movie except for a scene where it shrinks. To pull this off we had one wall on hand trucks so it could roll.

At one point Preble is lost in a frozen tundra. First we filmed him walking in front of a green screen wearing my grandmother’s old coat. Then I made a background by combining various free stock photographs.

To make snow to overlay in front of the image, we filmed flour floating through the air lit only by a flashlight.

Then we put it all together and added some breath condensation to sell it.

I made the small pink house at the end of the frozen tundra from a shoe box, some leftover dollhouse roof tiles, and other junk laying around like a plastic, drinking straw. We layered snow on top and added some smoke coming from the chimney and it was done.

The ad-blocking helmet was made by Marnie Ellen Hertzler. She made it by taking apart a bunch of electronics and then hot gluing wires and random bits to a bike helmet with some foil tape and Christmas lights thrown in.

Here’s the initial sketch for the Captain Kelly’s Chicken logo next to the final design by Nolan Strals.

I designed the menu screen in photoshop and then our friend and animator Julian Glander made the chicken head that talks. (Go watch Julian’s new animated feature “Boys Go To Jupiter” wherever you find your movies online)

A few of the effects in “Strawberry Mansion” involved some 3D modeling by Matt Lathrom. Here’s some photos showing how we turned a character into a blimp.

I sent Matt footage I had shot of a dead fly in a web made of hot glue (1st image) and then he worked his after effects magic and made it move and talk (2nd image.)

We filmed the actor’s in front of a black background then Matt built a 3D model of a bubble that would float down and swallow them up and float away.

When the bird lands on the chair in Bella's dream, I was just on the ground moving it around a bit and then I removed my hand in post. I bought the taxidermied bird on ebay and once we were finished filming it, put it right back up on ebay.

Perhaps the most important visual effect of all was transferring the entire movie to 16mm film. We knew since we used so many different VFX styles and artists, that putting it all to film would help bring a cohesion to all the footage.

We did multiple tests to figure out how the digital footage would look once we transferred it. We realized it looked best if we color corrected the digital footage once, then transferred it to film, then color corrected it a final time. Here’s some early digital test footage we transferred to film.

When we were first trying to make “Strawberry Mansion” people kept telling us we would need 15 million dollars to make it. Sure, there’s a version of the movie we could’ve made for that amount but the reality was we only had 200k. From these monetary limitations came creative solutions that gave the movie a handmade charm. A reminder to get together with some friends and make a movie by any means necessary.

Paying subscribers can watch a deleted scene below of Preble in a six minute epic battle with a Witch. For this scene we filled an entire room with unspooled VHS magnetic tape…Upgrade to paid subscriber now and you can watch this scene and we will also send you a Strawberry Mansion postcard. (DM us once subscribed with your mailing address).

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Let’s start with the house. Originally we were hoping to find a real mansion we could use for all the exterior shots. The summer of 2019 we drove all over Maryland hoping to locate the perfect house. We found some promising ones but none had that magic we were looking for. The final straw was when the Maryland Film Office gave us a binder of houses that they had used over the years and we drove way out into the country to see one and when we got there it was just an empty field. The house had been demolished years earlier. That day we resolved to go another route. I remembered a dollhouse I had purchased four years earlier for $99 from a thrift store. With my stepfather’s help, we built a porch addition on the front, painted it, and glued on some roof tiles. It was quite large so we nailed it to a board and added some fake bushes and trees in the front to help sell the illusion.

Watching behind-the-scenes videos I’ve learned it’s helpful to film your miniatures in the actual location where they will be inserted if possible, to help keep the lighting uniform. In the photo below you can see the house raised up with C stands so it sits in the frame pretty close to where it will be in the final image.

There’s a desert island that our two main characters spend some time on. Like with the miniature house, we knew it would be best to make a miniature and film it against a real sky. I made a small island out of clay, added a plastic palm tree and glued it all to a cork board I found in a dumpster. I screwed a table leg into the board to help it stand up.

In August of 2019 I was going to Bethany Beach for a week with my family so I brought the tiny island along. Every morning I’d wake before sunrise and take it to the beach and film. Every evening at sunset I’d do the same. I filmed on my trusty Canon T3i which I bought in 2011 and still use to this day. It felt nice to be filming at the beach I’d been coming to since I was a child. Some sunrises and sunsets were not spectacular, but a few were and those are the ones that made it into the movie.

There’s a buffalo that appears in an early dream sequence. We didn’t quite know how we would pull it off but thought if we made something for the actor’s to respond to, we could figure out the rest in post. Local artist Jac Bennett built a styrofoam head and glued fake fur to it. We brought it to the field and made a body out of fake fur. Then we had someone positioned under the fur, slowly moving it up and down, so it looked like the beast was breathing. The actors could walk around it and touch it, which was the most important thing to capture. Then in post production we digitally added blood to the buffalo’s wound and details to the head, making it look more realistic.

The first time we meet Young Bella in her dreams she has a woolly bear caterpillar crawling around in her hands. This wasn’t planned or written in the script. It happened spontaneously one day when Kentucker was changing out of his Preble outfit into the Grassman costume. We were waiting for him to come back and I looked down and saw a caterpillar crawling at my feet. I asked Grace if she would be comfortable holding it. She said ‘Yes’ and we rolled a few minutes of B-roll while we were waiting.

During post production we found ourselves a bit stuck in the edit and realized that if Preble turned into a caterpillar, it could solve some of our problems. We felt like it made sense since we’d already seen Bella holding a caterpillar in her dream. We asked our friend and animator Lawrence Becker to animate Preble’s caterpillar journey. He used a pipe cleaner and animated in front of a green screen. We took his footage and mixed it with a sunrise I had filmed one evening from my front porch. The ocean and desert were stock footage we purchased. Much of the snowstorm was flour filmed blowing against the night sky.

Towards the end of the movie our two main characters turn into comets hurtling towards Earth. First we filmed them saying all their lines in front of a green screen.

Then Lawrence animated the comets using hot glue, cotton balls, and colored acetate.

Lawrence then sent us the animated comet footage and we inserted the actor’s faces onto the burning rocks, as well as adding stars behind them. Then our colorist added a little shake to the whole shot to help sell the velocity.

For the scene of the dancing skeleton in the cemetery, we started by filming the empty grave where the skeleton would emerge. We sent this to Lawrence who then filmed himself for reference. Then he animated a cheap skeleton toy on blue and we put it all together for the final shot.

Towards the end of the movie we needed to show an entire room on fire. Of course we didn’t want to burn down our location so we built a section of the room outside and then burned that down.

The head of the Frog Waiter was built by Marnie Ellen Hertzler in a style she learned making Mardi Gras floats. The frog began as insulation foam on a bike helmet, then one sided corrugated cardboard, then papier-mâché and paint. The eyeballs were two red maracas we found in a thrift store. There was a thick rubber band on either side of the mouth that allowed it to open and close when I moved my mouth.

For a quick shot of an exploding head, we filmed our actor on a green screen and then sent that footage to Lawrence. He animated with clay, hair, and strawberry jam.

Our main character Preble has a dream where he looks into a mirror and sees his head open up, filled with squirming maggots. To achieve this we filmed Kentucker in front of the mirror, sent it to Lawrence who created a clay replica and animated on green.

One of my favorite practical effects was also one of the simplest: our main character is knocked over the head and falls to the floor. To show him woozily regaining consciousness we put a flexible mirror sheet on the ground, warped and bent it and filmed the reflection.

We wanted this parking lot to look more run down so one of our VFX artists, Matt Lathrom, added a bunch of cracks and overgrown grass. We also wanted the skyline to be littered with billboards and fast food signs so our friend Alan Resnick made some for us. Fun fact: the building in the background used to be a Sears and it was the first place I ever played a Super Nintendo.

Here’s how we made the blue demon grab the ship out of the ocean: first we made a collage sketch to help visualize what we were imagining. Then Clockwork Creature made the mask and I performed the action in front of a green screen. Matt Lathrom took the footage and added water and fire effects. I found the miniature ship at a thrift store and the large ship is the USS Constellation in the Baltimore Harbor. It was still open to tourists so sometimes we had to stop filming to let them walk through our frame. Since the ship is permanently anchored in the Baltimore Harbor we had to position the camera low and film up so we wouldn’t see any of the buildings in downtown Baltimore.

Which brings us to the four amazing heads that Clockwork Creature made for us. The only thing we added to any of them in post was a few blinks for the blue demon, other than that they all appear in the movie as they were filmed.

Throughout the film our main character Preble dreams in a small, pink room. At one point he’s greeted by someone special and we wanted the walls to fall down around him, revealing a green field. To achieve this we just built a pink wall in a field and then pushed it over.

Next week in part 2 we’ll share the rest of the VFX, as well as some deleted scenes and how we transferred the whole movie to 16mm film as our final visual effect.

Paying subscribers can watch a deleted scene below of Preble, in his apartment, going over his assignment before he heads to Bella’s home for the first time…Upgrade to paid subscriber now and we will send you a Strawberry Mansion postcard. (DM us once subscribed with your mailing address).

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The result is “Deerhead Video Prayers Vol. 1,” a 60-minute ambient video I’m releasing on VHS. There is no plot, no characters, just forgotten moments brought back to life. There is footage of an ant wandering in a watermelon. A dance party in Switzerland. A cat and dog roughhousing in slow motion. All set to a soundtrack pulled entirely from my collection of instrumental new age cassettes from the 1980s.

I tried not to be too precious with the edit. I worked fast and mostly after midnight, letting the footage guide me. Seven distinct sections emerged, each one with a new song and visual motif. Of course there are more important films to be working on (“The Stone Balloon”, “Tux and Fanny 3”) but sometimes it’s nice to embark on a little side quest to break up the monotony of the larger projects.

Maybe this is a video you can play to help you fall asleep. Maybe it’s a video to play in the background at a party. I don’t know exactly where it should be played or even if it should be played at all, I’m just glad these moments are no longer locked away on hard drives collecting digital cobwebs.

Paying subscribers can watch a digitized version of the VHS below. Or if you want something more tangible, you can purchase your very own limited edition VHS from the Person House web store here.

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Today’s post will be dedicated to our animated Christmas film, “The Stone Balloon.” In Episode 1, we introduced the project—the inspiration, the tone, the style. We’ve envisioned this as a homage to classic Christmas specials of yesteryear, particularly “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” It’s a bittersweet tale about Kurt, a 30-something rabbit who is not really feeling the holiday spirit this year.

The new episode covers some early creative decisions we’re making about the visual landscape, the look of Kurt and the world that surrounds him, and digital vs hand-drawn techniques.

Stay tuned to the end of the video to hear Albert discuss a couple new tools he’s acquired to aid his drawing and painting process.

Paid subscribers, watch the episode below which includes a work-in-progress clip of each drawing and animation we’ve currently completed.

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After directing my first film in 2007, “Team Picture,” I was invited to screen at the IFC Center in New York City as part of a series called “The New Talkies.” It made the front page of The New York Times Art section and was covered widely by major publications, cementing a new movement they were calling mumblecore. Soon careers were being launched (not mine). The figureheads of the new genre began working with Hollywood stars and associated figures—Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, the Duplass brothers—became household names. I flirted with the New York City scene, making regular trips from Memphis where I made short films with Dunham and played ping pong with Josh Safdie. But as they began to ascend into popular culture, I retreated back to the south.

My films fell through the cracks understandably. I was more interested in meandering no-budget films in Memphis than establishing a Hollywood career. I remember meeting up with Craig Brewer, a successful local director, and hearing his advice on the subject of my next project. He encouraged me to think about movie stars I wanted to work with. “They like doing indie films,” he insisted. “They’ll consider it, if you have a good script and a good story.” Of course he was right—he knew firsthand having just worked with Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci—but I was uninterested. Instead, I wrote a plotless film starring my non-actor friend Cole. And then another starring another non-actor friend, Jake.

Not to say I wasn’t serious about filmmaking. I was. Maybe too serious. I had a vision of what indie film was, or should be, and mumblecore aligned with that vision. The popular indie films of the day like “Garden State,” I criticized as corny and twee. Or worse, “Little Miss Sunshine,” a bright saccharine sign that indie film was completely dead. That wasn’t an indie film, I thought—it was a sitcom shot on location without a laugh track. Why was this movie premiering at Sundance and positioned as a superlative indie instead of the mildly diverting TV comedy that it felt like to me? I become somewhat of a zealot. Weren’t indie films supposed to be edgy or at least something challenging?

It didn’t matter that I had no money or that I worked with non-actors and barely any crew. My goal was to make movies that felt real coming from someone in his twenties, that reflected my experience and the uncertainties of youth. I assumed audiences would be impressed by my restraint, my unwillingness to make it easy, never resorting to obvious laughs or moments of conventional drama. They weren’t. But I persisted. My style was all about capturing people as they really were, nothing dramatized. We didn’t need good sound, or flashy images, or plot twists. We didn’t need good guys and bad guys, or characters learning lessons. In an all-out pursuit of hyper-naturalism, I steered clear of anything I considered artificial, overheated, or hyperbolic, even if it meant nothing happened at all. (Years later, I started a company called Movies Brand where I immortalized a common critique of my early films on a t-shirt that said “Nothing Happens”). My films of that period were the antithesis of what I turned to next.

When I met Albert, I started to think differently. At the Maryland Film Festival I saw his first feature, “The Beast Pageant.” It fell into the category of something I would have normally dismissed—too quirky, too stylized. But I didn’t dismiss it. Because I liked him. We had just met hours before but I liked his vibe and I liked the way he talked about his film. And I knew something needed to change in me. I needed to open up to the world, stop being so narrow-minded. That shift didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t see Albert again for over a year when he showed up to work as a sound guy for a film I was acting in—we had a lot of ground to cover before our visions could come together.

By the time I reached my thirties my laissez-faire attitude began to waver. A new kind of ambition grew in me. I needed to try something new. I moved to New York to break my habit of making no-budget films no one watched. I began to write a new script, one that wouldn’t be confined to naturalism. I began to envision stylized sequences, slo-mo, montages, surreal touches, things I would have never let myself do previously. But I struggled to finish the story. I was in-between styles and it never gelled. The project fell apart. I hit a dry spell. The next year I started another script but still I couldn’t crack it. I needed help to get outside of myself. One day, I casually mentioned to Albert that we should make a movie together. That’s the day I stopped mumbling and started dreaming.

My first film with Albert, “Sylvio,” was dripping in quirkiness. A comedy about a gorilla (obviously a man in a mask) living in the human world. I just had to take the leap. Throw away my ego. Commit to a complete reinvention. I had to fight myself and the instincts I had developed over the last decade. There was plenty of doubt. My artistic identity, how people viewed my body of work, was at stake. I tried to convince myself that no one cared, that no one was paying attention. And that was probably true. But I was still uneasy. It felt like a betrayal to myself and to the (few) people who responded to my early work. Throughout the production and editing process of “Sylvio,” I grappled daily with who I had become and why. It was an uncomfortable transition.

Despite my reservations, it was an invigorating challenge. I looked at it as an experiment—how would someone who normally wouldn’t make a movie like this make a movie like this? The first order of business was to upgrade the gorilla mask that Albert had been using to make Vines (he had built a following on social media before we made the film). In my mind we needed a custom mask to make this absurd character seem a bit more real. We went through a couple iterations and landed on one that felt the most alive and nuanced. For the first time, I became interested in story structure and craft. Swallowing my contrarian pride, I tried to play by the rules—draw the audience in, entertain them, give them a satisfying arc. In doing so, I think there were some critics who saw the film as a satire on twee crowdpleasers. I wouldn’t argue with that assessment but the primary goal was to play it straight. It would be hard to call “Sylvio” mumblecore or dreamcore but it was the bridge between the two. Once my feet were wet, I was ready to press on further.

Albert wrote the first draft of “Strawberry Mansion” before anyone knew what the word liminal meant. Before the creepypasta or backrooms internet lore took shape. And long before the term dreamcore was coined in the 2020’s. But apparently there is a cross generational interest in the surreal and uncanny. And by this time, I was unapologetically interested in the possibilities of going big—making something that built its own world, that flowed with imagination and style, that played on big emotions and incorporated big themes, even allowed for an antagonist. I had previously believed this was the playing field for Hollywood films only but I no longer felt that way. We had a right to claim our version of adventure, melodrama, visual wizardry.

I could theorize that dreamcore may be arising as a reaction to superhero movies or more simply technological exhaustion. I think we all sense that, in our hyper-digital, hyper-commercialized modern lives, the one part of ourselves that hasn’t been commodified to death is our subconscious minds. That’s where we can live free and experience the full gamut of unfiltered human emotion, fear, excitement, wonder. Where we can explore and express, even if it’s nonsensical. Because we’re curious beings, we want to color outside the lines. When certain artists feel restricted, confined by conglomerate walls, marketing, politics, and technology, they look for a way out. It’s exciting to feel something new break through even if it’s fleeting. Inevitably dreamcore—whatever people call it, or decide it means—will be commercialized, careers will be launched (probably not ours), Hollywood will absorb the talent, suck it dry, and then move on to the next thing.

Strawberry Mansion dreamcore TikTok

Yet, it’s a beautiful thing to collaborate on a film. I would have never made “Sylvio” or “Strawberry Mansion” alone, and neither would Albert. These films took both of us coming together from vastly different starting points, meeting at a point in the middle we’re equally excited. Almost every decision is made that way. The longer I’ve known Albert, the more our visions have melded together. I’ve grown to love high concepts—a gorilla living in the human world; a government auditor taxing dreams—because they open the door to visual excitement, narrative momentum, and metaphor.

Despite our high concepts, we have found ways to keep the films personal. “Sylvio” is about identity and artistic struggle. Our gorilla protagonist has a deep passion for his DIY puppet show, “Quiet Times with Herbert Herpels,” even though no one watches or cares. To me, this represents my early mumblecore work. Films made at home that were too small in scope or insular to create much impact. “Strawberry Mansion” is personal in more abstract ways. But also it represents an expansion of my ambition tapping into larger societal issues as well as the subconscious. After years spent trying to fully understand the original script for “Strawberry Mansion,” I realized the heart of the film was in its dreaminess. The key was to embrace the absurdity, the mystery, the unknowable. It shouldn’t be fully understood. That’s what makes it a dream. You know, it’s hard to understand mumbling too. There’s a connection there.

Paid subscribers, click below to watch: 1) “Don’t Cry Sylvio,” an unreleased music video for a song by Austin Leonard Jones, who contributed two songs to the original soundtrack. 2) “Family Tree”—an unreleased short film made by Kentucker Audley, Lena Dunham, and Timothy Morton.

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A month later my stepfather came home from work with a small black cat that had been found in a dumpster. The cat was all black except for the white around the collar so naturally we named him Tuxedo which was soon shortened to Tux. So now we had Fanny and Tux. Tux and Fanny. These were the family pets. Goldfish, lizards, hamsters all came and went, but Tux and Fanny persevered.

Fast forward 14 years, and I’m a junior in college. Tux the Cat and Fanny the Dog have both crossed over The Rainbow Bridge. I’ve found a part-time job working at the student-run daily newspaper, The Daily Orange. I’m in charge of putting together the comics page each night. This was a bygone era where comics and newspapers went together like peanut-butter and jelly. Most of my measly paycheck goes towards buying comics and graphic novels to read in my spare time. One comic I bought was “Amy and Jordan” by Mark Beyer. It was about a couple who always got into surreal misadventures and sorta hated each other but also everything sorta always worked out in the end. It was very dark and strange and I loved it.

I decided I wanted to draw my own version of Amy and Jordan, about two characters stumbling into bizarre adventures, but instead of them hating each other, they would be best friends. When it came time to name them something in my brain brought up my old, trustworthy pets, Tux and Fanny. I think because those two names already were so familiar to me and it was a way to honor the cat and dog I loved so dearly. I drew around 20 comics and then the school year ended and so did the comic.

Fast forward another 14 years. Now I’m living back in Baltimore and just bought a house with my girlfriend, Marnie. It’s wonderful to have a home together and to tend to all the little tasks and chores around the house. Soon we find ourselves cat-sitting for friends. It’s refreshing to have a cat in the house. It adds a new energy.

But soon this domestic bliss comes crashing down as we discover the cat is infested with fleas and tiny little gross bugs are all over our new house. I think the only way I am able to process this traumatic infestation of our home is to instantly animate it. I draw two friends, one pink, one purple, who live in a house in the forest and adopt a stray cat only to discover it is infested with fleas.

I decided to have them speak Russian because a few months earlier Kentucker and I had been to Moscow to show our first film “Sylvio.” I thought if I had Tux and Fanny speaking Russian it would be an easy way to keep learning this new language I had fallen in love with. It also meant I could record the voices on my computer and didn’t need to find voice actors.

Next I found a website that let me animate with pixels, fast and loose. Tux and Fanny are suddenly alive again. I sit on the sofa animating on my laptop while Marnie sits next to me playing video games or reading. The episodes come fast. Two sixty second episodes a week. Ideas usually come from things happening to us around the house or on daily walks. I started the season not knowing where it will lead, but I know I want all the episodes to knit together into a feature film. I started animating in June of 2018 and finished less than a year later in May of 2019. The film plays all around the world, including the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

I started making a sequel in 2020 called “Eyeballs in the Darkness.” This second film took a bit longer to finish than the first one. Partially because I was adding more detail but also because in the middle I embarked on a Tux and Fanny video game with Gabriel Koenig. The game is a prequel to the first film and is available on the computer, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and X-box and has even won some game awards.

Now it’s 2026 and I’ve animated 45 minutes of the third Tux and Fanny film called “When We Become Wind.” I’m trying to finish it by the end of this year, or early next year. Then the dream is to release a deluxe blu-ray with all three films. I don’t know what happens to Tux and Fanny after that. Maybe another video game, or another movie, or nothing at all. Time will tell.

Paid subscribers can watch an 11 minute film about how I make a Tux and Fanny episode below:

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(This piece was originally published in Talkhouse.) Albert and I prayed every morning driving to set while filming “Strawberry Mansion.” We are not prayer people. We weren’t praying to God, but we prayed. As we made our way out of Baltimore usually around 6 a.m., we asked for the strength and patience to make it through another day in the endless slog known as making a movie. Once our morning prayers were done, we listened to Adrianne Lenker and didn’t say much else for the rest of the 40-minute drive.

In 2012, Albert had emailed me with a script for “Strawberry Mansion,” asking if I’d be interested in acting in it. I didn’t know him at the time and wasn’t quite sure what to make of the script, so I was a bit non-committal. Over the next couple of years, our paths crossed by chance on a couple other film projects. In the fall of 2013, I took a bus from New York to Philadelphia to act in Alison Bagnall’s “Funny Bunny.” A white van was there to pick me up in Philly. Albert was driving the van. After a couple days as a P.A., Albert was promoted to boom mic operator and for the rest of the shoot he was our sound guy. I was intrigued to find out that he had recently gained a big following on the video app Vine with a character called Sylvio, a man in a cheap gorilla mask living a normal life. Millions of people would watch these little videos he made on his phone, which it took him 10 minutes to make. (By contrast, the film we were making — which took years to make — to this day, has been viewed by maybe 5,000 people.) I thought it was funny that he was the most famous person on set, and working as the boom operator. One day, I suggested we translate his character into a film. Having spent the past 10 years of my life making hyper-naturalistic mumblecore films in Memphis, I was ready to switch it up. “Sylvio” felt like a way out of myself.

It’s hard to justify making a movie when you get a little older, and you haven’t had much success with your previous work. It’s a constant question, why you’re putting yourself through the struggle. Why do something extraordinarily complicated when it seems all people want is little snippets on their phones? That proved accurate when the feature film version of “Sylvio” didn’t attract much attention beyond our circle of friends and colleagues. (Vine shut down a month before our SXSW premiere, taking Albert’s 500,000 followers with them and our main way we were planning to promote the film.) Despite the fact that “Sylvio” didn’t sweep the nation, we had a fun time making it, and so we set our sights on making another film.

In July 2017, Albert and I went down to his dad’s place in Pennsylvania for a week, staying in his step-mother’s art studio in the hopes of taking Albert’s original “Strawberry Mansion” script and refining it. We bought writer’s hats (only to be worn while writing) and got to work. At the end of the week, we had made precisely no progress on “Strawberry Mansion,” but had a fully formed outline for another movie called “Dream Girl.” It came to us quickly and seemed fun and easy, two things that weren’t happening with “Strawberry Mansion.” And then we played frisbee.

After the week, we went back to our lives — Albert teaching in Baltimore, and me running NoBudge in Brooklyn. The next summer we made a plan to return to the house in Pennsylvania to begin writing “Dream Girl.” We figured we’d pump out a script and be ready to film sometime next year. After a couple days, we soured on the idea. Though it was supposed to be a subversion of a typical ’80s comedy, it ran the risk of falling into superficial tropes, and the main plot seemed somewhat problematic (details for another essay). Because we didn’t know what else to do, we sat down and re-read the old “Strawberry Mansion” script. After we finished, I looked to Albert and asked, “Does this still make sense to you?” He said yes. I sat there in silence for a couple seconds. I told him that I thought he should make it, and I would step away. After a couple minutes, he asked me if I’d still want to act in it. I wasn’t confident. It was a painful morning. It felt like a break-up.

Films take years to make, and meanwhile years keep slipping by. Years that could be spent doing something else, something less agonizing, less financially draining, something with fewer moving parts. Nothing happened for a long time. One day, I got a call from Albert that said he had won a Baltimore grant that could help kickstart the production of “Strawberry Mansion. If I had gotten this call five years ago, I would have been elated to get started. This time, it felt like a burden. A couple weeks later, Albert got a note from a producer recommending that the script could use another draft. I agreed, and I knew an old colleague, Linas Phillips, who teaches virtual script-writing workshops. We took the class, and by the second week, the script started to make sense to me for the first time. One day, while working on the next week’s assignment, Albert looked at me and said, “Does this mean you’re directing this thing with me?” I guess that’s what it meant.

We filmed “Strawberry Mansion” in two parts, in September and December of 2019. It was a tough shoot. Not in the Terry Gilliam “tough shoot” kind of way, but tough emotionally. Tough in the way where we question whether this is what we want out of life. Working 14-hour days on top of our day jobs, getting paid nothing, with very little possibility that anyone will ever see or care about this movie. I struggled in other ways: my sister was dying of cancer at the time. My mom was going through a difficult bout with Parkinson’s disease. We were working with a whole new crew. Only a couple of them I knew. I felt like an outsider. It wasn’t fun. Throughout filming, our mantra was, “This is our last movie.”

On one of the last days of shooting, we were way behind schedule. We had several more set-ups to go and it was already midnight. Outside it was 30 degrees and we were filming in a log cabin that was even colder. Albert was playing a character called the Blue Demon. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, his body was painted blue. Everyone was frustrated and over it. On the last take, I yelled “Action.” Albert sauntered over to the bed slowly, menacingly. He was supposed to get into bed, but he stopped short. He paused. Everyone watched the monitor. What’s he doing? Shivering, we tried to will him into bed. He waited another second longer. All the sudden, he dropped to his knees and started praying. This was not in the script and it was never discussed. I watched in awe. He only did it on that one take, and that’s the take we used in the final film.

When I got the call that we had gotten into Sundance, it was a surreal set of emotions. I was relieved, overwhelmed, excited, proud. But also, I reflected on how long it took to get here. Egotistically, I had pictured this moment coming a lot earlier in my life, say when I was 25 years old and my family was still intact and I could call up my dad and have him be proud of me. It also felt unimportant, in a way. Like, this acceptance didn’t mean anything really. It didn’t mean my life was going to change, it didn’t mean I had “made it.” The chances that our movie would sell and get seen and liked were still small. And even if it did, we’d tell ourselves that’s not why we do this.

For the past several summers, Albert has invited a group of friends to go tubing and hang out for a weekend in the country. I usually spend a lot of time floating on my tube alone, behind or in front of everyone else, just appreciating the slowness and quiet of the lazy river. I’ll just lie there and look up at the trees, or notice the time it takes to reach an overpass, or a bend in the river. And eventually I’ll return to the group, and somebody will set up a bottle across the river, and we’ll throw rocks until we hit it. It takes a while. I guess that’s the fun of it.

But then I realized I don’t actually know how to program which is a very important part of the process. (On “Tux and Fanny” Gabriel Koenig was handling all the programming. ) So I thought if I couldn’t make real video games, I could at least make fake ones. The first one I made was “Melody Electronics” and follows Melody as she shows off her many household electronics.

The title for that one came from a quick sign in the background of one of my favorite movies, “Chungking Express”.

That sign was enough to get my brain turning and in a few weeks the first fake video game was complete.

The next fake game I made was “Tank Fantasy” and was inspired by the Sega CD games I remember playing that, at the time, had state of the art graphics but we’re actually really bad and almost unplayable. The initial idea came to me after seeing a picture my friend’s Grandmother took…

Keep reading + watch a brand new exclusive short film, “Head Home” below.

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