Tell you what, John Updike would have hated TikTok (here I am again, straight off the bat with today’s biggest topics…)
I have a collection of Updike’s art writing – incredible hauteur pricked with flashes of dazzling insight – and recently came across a 1997 review, in which he rails against, “this age of acute aesthetic impatience… wherein visual stimulations have the duration and subtlety of electric shock treatments.”
Imagine handing him an iPhone and watching his horror as he learns what “acute aesthetic impatience” really looks like (probably something we could do with Ai?).
I don’t believe that the internet has decimated our attention spans. But it’s clearly redefined what we think of as a long video.
Railing against that is futile – it’s very man shouts at cloud, or, in its artsier incarnation, Scorsese admonishing people not to watch his films on their phones.
I’m more interested in seeing the amazing art people create in these shorter parameters. Take Johnny’s Home (2017), part of a trilogy of shorts commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Created in the early days of the Trump administration, its aim was to start a conversation about mass incarceration.
It features three topics – cash bail, extreme sentencing and re-entry for released prisoners, which is what Johnny Perez’ story focuses on.
In just two minutes and 19 seconds, director Elyse Kelly and her team create a beautiful balance of emotion and insight, head and heart. It’s a perfect short piece, and highlights the creative potential of less is more.
I spoke to Elyse over Zoom from her home in DC. You can see more of her work on her website or her production company’s site.
Why did you want to tell this story?
It was 2017, and there was a lot happening in the US in 2017. There was a lot of turmoil and a lot of spotlight on the ACLU and its work. Essentially, they're a giant organisation of lawyers, and they were trying to reframe why they do what they do .
They wanted to start putting a face to the statistics, and so they were really pushing to fold storytelling into their work, to humanise it.
This film was part of an ongoing campaign to essentially end mass incarceration in the US – they wanted to incite conversations.
You get an information dump from them, like, these are the issues, this is the thought leadership that we've been creating in these spaces, and they obviously have a bunch of experts that were available.
We take all that and run with it. We did a lot of pre-interviews, trying to find the right people because we needed to hit those topics that the ACLU wanted to focus on, but we also needed to find engaging, dynamic stories.
And because we were fully animating it, we also needed those people to be really great storytellers. We’re never going to see them on screen, it’s just going to be their voice.
Johnny is such a great storyteller. He has such a great voice and inflection, and there's a lot of passion behind the way he tells his story.
Like a lot of the people we spoke to, Johnny has told his story so many times, but he's still able to capture the emotion and the heart of the experience in a way that doesn't feel like he's being performative.
The other piece that came out when we were pre-interviewing was the part of his story when he talks about being released from prison. And he was truly dropped in the middle of Times Square after being locked away for 13 years.
That visual really jumped out at us – the sharpness and bleakness of the solitary confinement juxtaposed with the lights, and the colour, and the vibrancy.
We were doing a lot of concept art and we had a brilliant animation director, Anna Bron.
She made this beautiful image really early on that captured the feeling that I think Johnny had, that we were trying to express – where even though there's this chaos in Times Square, he still feels very isolated and alone.
It was just this silhouette of him, and behind him is an explosion of colour. We saw that and we were like, it's not perfect yet, but this is the feeling that we need to strive for in this film.
What was the biggest challenge?
Johnny was our first interview, so we went up to New York and when we got there, a lot was going on.The ACLU was having a big fundraising event and there was construction happening in their building.
We showed up having planned to spend the entire day having a conversation with Johnny learning about his experience, but also a broader one about his life. We never wanted to feel transactional.
This is the first time I’d done the interviewing for a film, so I was already super nervous. And we showed up and we're basically told that we had 20 minutes with him.
I was like, what are we going to do? And my producer pulls me aside. She's like, these are the questions you have to ask him We’ve just got to make sure we get at least enough to fill out a three-minute film.
I sat down and, I still look back and I'm amazed that I did this. But my gut was like, no. I know they said we have 20 minutes. I don't care.
I’m going to go with my gut here, and it might backfire. But I just started having a conversation with him, not about the project, about his daughter I think.
Just a normal conversation, because I really wanted to get to know him and make sure that he felt comfortable too.
We just started talking, and kept talking and kept talking, and we ended up spending hours with him. They kicked us out of the one room and instead of saying, "Okay, thanks for coming," he was like, "Let's find another room."
By the end, he was showing us the journals he wrote when he was incarcerated, which are really personal and special.
In the film, when he's in that cell that's closing in on him, we were actually able to take a few stills of his journals and put some of that writing on the walls.
Is there anything you’d do differently?
I would have loved to spend even more time with them, not only in person but in the films themselves.
We were working with a very limited runtime, but there are so many great elements of their stories that didn't make it into the films.
We wanted people to understand these lives in a way that was more nuanced than just saying, oh, they did X, and they were incarcerated.
How do you capture the heart? But also, because it's a commission, how do you make sure that it fits within the broader context of the story that the organization is telling?
What are you most proud of?
I’m amazed that it went as well as I hoped it would. I'm so glad that I didn't just jump into the interview, because I think that relationship really came through in the film.
And I think it is something that feels really special and authentic to what he went through. When they premiered these films, there was a really lovely Q&A with all of the people who were featured afterwards.
Johnny got up and said, “My story has been told dozens of times. Never did I think a cartoon would be the version that best captured my experience.”
There's no higher praise than the person whose story you're telling saying that this resonates with them.
How did making this film change you?
I think most of us have probably learned that your gut is never wrong. I feel like the few instances where I thought, "No, I'm not going to listen to my gut." I'm always like, "Why didn't I listen to my gut?"
Being there, boots on the ground so to speak, meeting these people, sharing their lives with them, that really connected with me in a special way.
Working in the narrative space, the drive to do good work is there. But there is that extra little something in documentary, because we need to make sure we do justice to this person, their family, their experience.
I know at the end of the day, they’re going to watch it. And they’re the most important person.
If anyone else connects with it, awesome. If it helps the ACLU champion the issues that they're fighting, spectacular. But my audience is that individual.
I really enjoyed Elyse’s insights into the specific challenges of making commissioned work. Having sat on the other side of that desk, it was eye-opening to get such a thoughtful sense of how artists like Elyse approach these projects.
See you in a couple of weeks you sassy little badgers!