
You may have found your way here
through Sookie The Bat! I thought I would go a little into the backstory of
Sookie here.
Sookie was a stuffed animal bat that Sara Heisley and I bought in the mountains
on a trip, in my longstanding habit of inappropriately anthropomorphising
everything, I always made the bat run up and stick her butt in peoples faces
then run off. That seemed like as good a concept for an internet film as any so
after thinking about it for a long time I decided to run with it and shot the
film over the course of...well, let's not get into how long films take when
you're an underground film maker, it's embarrassingly long.
How I found Superfun was that
I was out shooting a pinup set a few months back and the model and I ended up at
an industrial facility that had been designated as a biological/chemical hazard
to human life/the environment. A number of these sites nationwide have been
classified as Superfund sites, areas substantially contaminated and listed as a
priority for clean up by the Federal Government, which of course makes a lovely
back drop for a photoshoot!
While we were shooting I noticed a stuffed animal bear sitting by the fence. I
had meant to grab him but a storm came out of nowhere and forced us to relocate
the shoot. When we were done I told the model "Don't think I'm silly but I need
to go back and grab a stuffed bear I saw at the first location!" so we headed
back and I picked him up. Something about a bear sitting in a toxic waste dump
of a place was pretty fucking depressing to me. I brought him home, Lily sewed
him back together and I gave him what amounted to a 3 day bath.
I had originally planned to come up with a different name but "Superfun" a
shortened version of the name of the place I found him, just seemed to fit.
Dustin Shelbourn volunteered to be an extra on the film and operate the boom mic,
he was quickly drafted into animating Superfun on set. I had planned on altering
the voice to be something more whacky or distinctive but as editing went on I
decided that Dustin WAS Superfun. He just got the character I was looking for
and honestly, and I mean this in the best way possible, I feel like they share a
lot of similarities. Namely that Dustin and Superfun both look like totally
normal, mellow guys on the outside but in reality, both of them have seen some
shit and are capable of more chicanery than you'd first suspect.