Short Films in Focus: Welcome to the Enclave | Features

How did you land on the Carly Simon song?

It was actually Brenna’s idea! I insisted we choose a deep cut from one of the holy trinity of white boomer mom favorites—Carole King, Barbara Streisand, or Carly Simon—and Brenna suggested “Coming Around Again.” The message of the song is perfect for the film’s climax. I see it as a song about staying in a situation that’s breaking your heart and keeping up appearances despite the pain. That’s what Moni is doing in that final scene when she dances to it. Plus, the lines about burning the soufflé and kissing the dinner party host goodbye suggest a certain status quo that Moni wants to uphold with The Enclave. After I got a quote for using the track in the film, I realized I could save thousands by re-recording it myself. I’m an avid karaoke singer, and I thought a karaoke, low-fi version of the song would fit better within the world of the film. I like the “almost-ness” of the fantasy neighborhood. The 3D graphics for The Enclave are a bit second-rate, partially due to my own limitations, but I also purposefully built the neighborhood in Unity instead of Unreal, a more cinematic game engine, to give it a noticeably digital look. The 3D animation isn’t quite good enough to fool you into thinking it’s real, but if you, like the women in the film, wanted to believe badly enough, you could suspend disbelief and accept it as real enough. The karaoke track feels similar to me.

Is this your first deep dive into animation? Or a live action animation hybrid? (if yes, was that a challenge?)

This is definitely my first deep dive, but my background in visual effects means I’ve dabbled in more subtle forms of animation and compositing. I was a motion graphics artist for Martha Stewart for a handful of years and have worked on some indie films doing small animation projects. However, this project was a big step into the unknown because 3D is a whole other monster. That being said, it proved fruitful not to know what I was doing. In the end, my own failures in using the software became content for the film. The entire ending with the ruined landscape started as an accident. Initially, I wanted the mountains to close in slowly and subtly, but my code was wonky, and they started taking over the whole neighborhood. It was a real “aha” moment and became the poetic finale where the mountains dissolve as we move inside them, revealing the clunky artifice behind the beautiful exterior. I like to aim too high, be too ambitious, and land in the murky A-/B+ range. There are technologies available for syncing live-action camera movement to digital camera movement, but I decided to do the syncing by hand. As a result, the confluence of the characters and their world is a bit slippery. I enjoy the aesthetics of “not-quite”; they’re flawed in the way humans are. We are aware that something feels a bit off but can’t quite identify what it is. It’s uncomfortable. I wanted the animation in the film to feel like it’s holding on by a thread, just like the women are by the end.

How do you know Brenna Palughi?

Brenna and I met in 2007 when I was in art school at Yale and she was in the drama school. Someone recommended her to choreograph the dance sequence for my thesis film, and we had an instant connection. In the almost two decades since, we’ve worked on each other’s projects across film, music video, installation, and theater. For “Welcome to the Enclave,” we shot the green screen footage over three years in various locations from her living room in Brooklyn to my kitchen in Texas. Our director/actor relationship is almost non-verbal at this point because Brenna understands my work and vision so deeply. She’s a brilliant writer, director, and choreographer and also has a strong background in improv comedy, which you see in scenes like Blair’s glitter mug scene and Moni’s final dance.