Mongrel

For me, it all started with the barbarian-who-kinda-looked-like-my-dad: Mongrel. 

And that’s not a coincidence, as my father’s death loomed large over my move away from toiling in the freelance graphic design mines (and moving on from the years running a small record label, Yer Bird, now best known for releasing a pre-Father John Misty album under J. Tillman’s real name). After a string of particularly demoralizing and artless design gigs, and with mortality looming large in my mind, I decided to finally take a stab at doing something just for myself.

I went to a university with an art department that loathed modernity and pop art, so I transferred from that into the media department, but when my interests turned to filmmaking, their focus on news broadcasting simply didn’t have the resources to meet that. This meant I was sneaking into the lab to abscond with the cameras at night, teaching myself. While I did attempt one feature then, Blood Rush, a campus slasher that somehow still escalated to end with the destruction of the Earth (it never got further than an S-VHS trailer with a Danzig song underneath). The combination of what I could accomplish on my own and the scale that I wanted to work at proved simply unworkable. After I graduated and lost access to any film equipment - and this was in the pre-smartphone era - well, I just couldn’t see a way to make films.

But, in that moment of existential crisis a decade later, I thought a career change was desperately needed, so I went back to seeing what I had the tools to create films, again. After all those years working in digital art, and given the nerdy, epic scale I’ve always loved, and that I had a lot of time and not a lot of money, animation seemed like the thing to do. That’s where Mongrel comes in. 

Basically, he was going to be a bit of a reverse Conan - resentful of adventure for its own sake, and a brutally castrated eunuch that wasn’t going to be beguiled by any frost giant’s daughters. The story of the first short was essentially improvised as I went, making up animation processes as I went (like with everything I’ve done professionally, all self-taught trial and error). The style of that original experiment was essentially ‘Flash’ puppet animation, though I was doing it all in Photoshop and Premiere which I’m sure sounds abhorrent to any industry animators (that’s still the software I still work in, all these years later, too, though the style’s changed). 

I like to pretend this doesn’t exist because it’s so crude and so unrepresentative of how I work now, but I do love the fun voice acting from one of my favorite power couples: Jason Gore (of The Best Show and The Hawk podcast fame, the latter being an ongoing classic rock radio psychodrama) and Kristen Bartlett (late night comedy writer, notably for SNL and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal), who elevated this very basic first step. You’ve got to start somewhere:

One thing to note is that I was calling this animation project ‘Gorgon’ back then - I pleasantly wrote Gorgon Pictures, of Faces of Death infamy, if they cared, and received a hostile email about trademarks in response, so I changed it moving forward to Gorgonaut (which is, essentially, simply the result mashing up ‘Gorgon’ with Black Sabbath’s Supernaut, which I had on at the time). 

The major event for me, animation-wise, that occurred in the creation of this simple short was that handful of frames at 4:35 where Mongrel’s cloak is supposed to be dramatically twirling as he turns. Using the puppet style of animation I’d been using just fundamentally wasn’t working, so I had the thought… what if I rotoscoped it? I’d grown up with an obsession with the style from the Bakshi films, and from Heavy Metal, so I thought it’d be interesting to try it out. I found a cheap pink digital camera on Craigslist (as the smartphone era had now arrived and people were selling them off cheap), and my ever-patient partner filmed me twirling a sheet wrapped around my shoulders. It was only like 6 frames of animation, but I was immediately hooked at how fun the process was, and - armed with Philadelphia tween’s outdated camera - decided to see how far I could take this process. 

On the day after Halloween - I remember it because all the props were from the Spirit Halloween clearance sale - I started putting together materials for shooting an all-rotoscoped continuation of Mongrel’s adventure. Recruiting an old roommate and my brother and his girlfriend, we moved the coffee table out of the living room and got to work, filming all the reference footage over a couple of afternoons. The lion was a pillow, my brother all of the ape underlings!

Then, the animation began, an all-consuming process that took about 6 months. My partner was extremely understanding as I pursued this new obsession, but, in the end, it came out pretty neat:

I’m still very pleased with how the music came out - just me noodling around with a Moog emulator - and I really like the blue-green colors in the backgrounds. The rotoscoping is pretty loose, but I think the scale of the apes and Ape King both work well, and I love that shot of the Ape King ascending the steps in the shadows.The Dennen character, incidentally, is myself (now much younger). 

When I uploaded the finished project to YouTube this short received a small amount of internet coverage, most notably from io9.com - still pretty influential back then - and that got a fair amount of eyes on it, which would lead to Machinima - which, again, was a big site back then - requesting to put it in their short film festival in LA. I told them I was already deep into working on the follow-up, Exordium, but that’s a story for a later post.

People have been asking what happens after Mongrel is beaten half-unconscious and dragged away by the Ape King’s minions for over a decade, and I’d love to have the chance to tell that story someday, but, if I can’t, here’s the broad strokes of what goes down:

A wagon carrying scavenged goods to sell in Ul-Imir’s busy desert marketplace passes through the Baj jungle, near the dead city of Ka-Mul, and is attacked by the jungle apes who live there. One of them recovers a crown looted centuries ago from the battlefield atop The Mountain where The Bloom (the magical flower from The Spine of Night) resides. Imbued with trace properties of The Bloom from centuries being in proximity to it, it grants this ape knowledge of human history and civilization, which he uses to raise a simian army in the Ka-Mul ruins as The Ape King. 

Seeking to unearth the mystical secrets that doomed Ka-Mul’s lost human society, he runs afoul of Mongrel, who’s been hired to loot the same treasure vaults. Thwarted, The Ape King makes an allegiance with the The Golden Glaive cult in Ul-Imir to get their aid in opening the Ka-Mul vaults, where they believe they can the ancient deity The Cyclopean. Part of this exchange involves them entrapping Mongrel with a false kidnapping plot to solve, which leads to his capture at the end of the short. 

From there, Mongrel and Dennen are tortured in the dungeons of The Golden Glaive. They are ultimately unable to contact The Cyclopean, despite all their blood sacrifices, and their efforts are ended when an organization of assassins attacks the tower. They are dedicated to ending the era of kings, and that includes The Ape King, who’s used the last year to expand his shadow kingdom within Ul-Imir. The Ape King escapes them, and Mongrel and Dennen are freed, but only if they agree to help the kingkillers gain access to the highly-secure palace of King Uxon, who is their prime target. Mongrel’s underground network of itinerant spies hears that Uxon’s arrogant son, Pyrantin, is hiring a crew to build a new kingdom of his own out on the borderlands by the Allsorrow swamps. Seizing this opportunity to gain the trust of one of Uxon’s family to then leverage into access to the King himself, Mongrel and Dennen find employment in this expedition, with Mongrel quickly ascending to the role of Pyrantin’s head enforcer. This is where we find Mongrel at the beginning of The Spine of Night. 

Mongrel is, without a doubt, the foundation of all the animated works Gorgonaut has undertaken thus far, as humble as these early efforts were. They hold a really special place in my heart, made with my friends and family, as I pursued a mostly-dead animation style for an audience of pretty much only myself, and which led to finding other weirdos out there who were into it, too.