Staff Blog

November is an interesting month. Depending on where you live, it can mean spending time with family, buying a cheap flat screen, or not shaving your mustache for weeks on end. While these four weeks have meant different things to different people, one thing we've all shared is yet another heap of awesome vids on the Vimeo Staff Picks Channel! Some shared great stories, others wowed us visually, and a few managed to do both. See for yourself:

Of these seven impressive videos, one in particular left us with more questions than answers. "Interesting Ball" by our old pals Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, a.k.a. DANIELS, left us scratching our heads long after it stopped streaming.

"Interesting Ball" made us laugh, cry, and question our view of reality — and all in under 13 minutes. We talked to DANIELS about where the concept for this film came from, how they achieved it technically (hint: fake butts), and what kind of reaction, if any, they expected the film to elicit.

Looking at the credits of "Interesting Ball," it appears the writing of the film was collaborative. Can you tell us where some of the concepts and imagery originated? Was it a team effort all the way from writing through production?

DS: Totally a team effort. This movie is a collection of the weirdest ideas we ever heard or came up with created by all our closest friends whenever they had time to donate to the project. That's why it's got four story by credits and two DOP's and multiple production designers. We shot it in chunks and edited it between other projects for a whole year. Everyone reading this, please watch the credits and hire those rock stars. They're all overqualified sweethearts who genuinely care about the quality of the work they do.

DK: The reason there are so many "story by" credits is we essentially adopted all of our friends' orphaned ideas. They were ideas that were fleeting jokes that stuck around years after they were told, ideas that were so bad that no one else would let our friends make them, or ideas that we thought were funny, but were also really embarrassed by. This whole film was an exploration of terrible ideas. We're thankful that our friends were so trusting with their ideas.

There are a range of emotions found in "Interesting Ball." It's hilarious, bizarre, and disturbing, but also manages to be surprisingly heartfelt and relatable. As directors, what is the key to making sure the heartfelt moments don¹t get lost in the surface-level craziness?

DS: With this process our goal was just to let the project become what it wanted to become. Every step of the way through production, it evolved and fluctuated between comedy and drama. There was a rough cut of it when we wanted it to be a comedy and we realized this isn't very funny... let's try something else. This project was less about clarity of vision and more about being honest with ourselves as we let it evolve. Like a Pokemon.

DK: Yeah, like Pokemon. Rather than forcing an Evee to evolve into a Flareon using a fire stone, we allowed the Evee to grow into whatever it needed to be, whether that was an Espeon or an Umbreon, which naturally happens when the Pokemon trainer's friendship level is high.

A lot of the people in this film are familiar faces from your past projects. Did you have any of them specifically in mind when going into the casting process?

DS: We love working with friends because we already know them and their talents intimately. We wrote the Waymond story for Waymond. But everyone else was a negotiation of who was available. And we tried to let each cast member make their character their own. We're just bummed we didn't squeeze everyone in there. Billy from Pockets and Puppets was busy! But we got Ani from Underwear, Mike from Dogboarding, and Tim from Battles.

DK: When you have no money, you have to write to what you have, and so we found a lot of inspiration from the resources we had around us. It allows us to push the story when we know what kind of talent is around us, rather than writing for hypothetical actors. The whole short film only came together when we decided that Waymond would be the narrator of the whole film. When you meet him for the first time, he has the opposite voice from what you would expect and we love that about him. Even the locations are all friends' homes or places we hang out a lot. The cafe is a cafe that Daniel's girlfriend helped start, the fridge house was one of Art team's house, the beach where the bros hung out is our favorite beach to hang out at, etc.

There is an amazing preproduction test image of Daniel Kwan wearing a fake butt. Did you guys incorporate practical elements like that into a lot of the effects?

DS: Yeah, everything is practical to some degree. We shot all the bros individually on green screen. Built a real fridge and breakaway wall. We try to have every effect at least start with practical elements then the VFX are about polishing and compositing. For the inside the ball galaxy stuff we shot a drone into orbit along with 20 dummies dressed like our characters. No VFX at all.

There are some really fantastic Vimeo comments on this video with lots of unexpected reactions to the film. When making a film like this, are you able to anticipate how people are going to react to it? What¹s been your favorite reaction so far?

DS: The funnest part of this project was the fact that we had no freaking clue who would watch it or how they would react. We love comments good and bad. I've attached a few of my favorites.

Thanks guys!