“We knew we were going to walk into the fire doing this,” said Brandon P. Schwindt.
The director is in Los Angeles along with his brother and cinematographer Garrett Schwindt and co-director Josh Lowe to show their short film Bottoms Up! at the Studio City International Film Festival. The film won an award for best short film at the Cinetech Future Fest in Opole, Poland, this past spring and premiered in Dallas two weeks ago. Now, the Fort Worth-shot film will have its debut on Tue, Sep 17, at Tulips FTW. The reason why the filmmakers were so trepidatious about the project is because they set out to use AI programs to create the animation in their partially live-action film.
“This is a way to make something crazier than I ever thought I could,” Brandon said.
He and Lowe, both 39, met when they were attending Hurst High School. (Lowe said, “He was the best artist, and I was second best.”) Their filmmaking projects together include a feature that they shot illegally at North East Mall. While Garrett is a graduate of UNT’s film program and the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts in Fairfield, Iowa, Brandon dropped out of community college to start working on film sets immediately. When Clayton Coblentz founded the production company Texas Producer in 2018, the Schwindts joined up immediately, making corporate videos and animated logos for local clients. The firm ended up funding Bottoms Up!, with Coblentz acting as a producer. The filmmakers estimate the budget between $20,000 and $30,000 and said that a team of animators would have easily run the figure into six digits.
Bottoms Up! is an ostentatious and quite impressive display of cinematic techniques, with a story about a doctor (Stephanie Cearley) who is getting drunk at a bar on a Tuesday morning when her dog runs off. The pursuit leads her to journey through several cinematic sequences, including a silent film, a recreation of the Moon landing, and a 1970s TV talk show. The filmmakers shot these scenes with live actors at Lowtown Studios, then used an AI program to overlay the live footage with a look that’s surprisingly similar to rotoscoping animation and which imitates the celluloid look of period films as well as the horizontal lines of analog TV.
“Most of the [post-production work] was completed in Adobe After Effects, and a specialty plugin from Maxon was used to create the film grain and TV fuzz,” Brandon said.
Garrett added that while the AI programs did not pick up on some of the nuances of the lighting, Brandon’s storyboards and the filmmakers’ strict adherence to them bailed them out. “It took the actors some time to adjust [to the greenscreen]. None of them have done something this different. If not for the storyboards, we would have wasted a lot of time with people imagining, ‘Where are we?’ ”
Garrett said using AI seemed like a “suicidal move” in the summer of 2023, when Hollywood’s writers were on strike. Brandon, Garrett said, “sold it as a way to use this technology that’s going to be here no matter what. We’re still writers.”
Brandon pointed out that the project required them to hire more workers than any of their previous ones, including an animal wrangler for the dog. The live-action scenes were shot at the Fort Worth Water Gardens and Down ’N Out on the Near Southside.
Brandon said he intends to take a mental break while Bottoms Up! makes the rounds of festivals, but the filmmakers have a couple of projects that they intend to try out next. Garrett noted that even without AI, film production and distribution are rapidly changing. “There’s always the ability to make things regardless of your socioeconomic status. Independence comes from knowing the process and being able to wear every hat. We’ve always done things on our own and not relied on other people to make our vision.”
To aspiring filmmakers, he said, “Go out there and make mistakes.”
Bottoms Up!
8pm Tue, Sep 17, at Tulips FTW, 112 St. Louis Av, FW. Free. 817-367-9798.
