5 Questions with Alexander Laird and Alexander Swift
“Sad Kids,” by directors Alexander Laird and Alexander Swift, is a zany, fun-loving mock-up of a kids TV show from Canada, completely convincing if not for its slippages of profanity and references to masturbation. We asked Laird and Swift how the project came to be, how they form their ideas, and their “twist” ending…
1) Can you talk a little bit about your backgrounds, and how you first got interested in making movies / videos?
Aexander Laird: We have loved the art of cinema since being young and seeing Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
Alexander Swift: I thought Subulba was cool.
AL: Me I liked the Gungan king (Boss Rugor Nass)
"Yousa no thinken yousa greater than the Gungans? Mesa lika this. Maybe wesa being friends."
―Nass, to Padmé Amidala[src]
2) What about this project? Where did it come from? How long have you been thinking about this idea, and what different stages did it go through?
AS: It’s largely based off “The Zone” on YTV, a Canadian after school programming block that everybody watched that had hosted segments between episodes of Spongebob. (Link: https://youtu.be/pYtgCbXuFSc)
AL: The project started as my thesis project at York University in TORONTO CANNAAADDAAAA. We shot and animated large bulks of the film in a three week span near the end of the semester, but I had over-extended myself on too many projects that the final product was not up to snuff of what I wanted. We revisited the film a year later after graduating and me moving to NEW YORK CITY USAAAAAA, from there it became an online collabo.
AS: We had to wait till he got a better computer.
3) There’s so many crazy little ideas, like the Florida facts or the instructions to see the girl’s bra in the game, or “they roofed my hat!”. I’m wondering how your creativity works. Are these random things you’ve thought over the years, or do you just sit down to do the animations / drawings and go wild?
AS: I think with the weird specifics, it was just a process of Laird and I doing flow of consciousness writing as we thought back to weird and miserable moments from our childhoods, or just having a topic like “Florida Facts” and trying to quickly bang out a list of dumb shit that would make us laugh. I think Laird and I just have good memories for inconsequential stuff.
AL: A lot of it is just keeping notes upon notes of ideas. This film was structured on just having as many ideas as possible and then picking and choosing the best ones and deciding how they flowed together as a whole. For more complex ideas like Florida and the Hentai High II walkthrough, it was something we both knew we could hash out together. The process of animating and recording it was a really great process. We each decided what we wanted to animate then went to work on it.
AS: It was very slapdash. We lived together for the first iteration of Sad Kids, so I would run into Laird’s Room to get a prompt for the animation or a piece of score and run back to my room to get working, then have Laird run over to see what I had done.
AL: A sprinting household.
4) Your host is so perfect. Does he have experience in kids entertainment or just a natural? How did you approach the live segments in general? Was it all scripted out, or looser? How long did you shoot for, and where was it?
AS: Oh yeah, Shane’s a pro.
AL: Shane was one of my classmates at film school, but in a former life he had been a host of a few TV shows on TVO (Television Ontario, the PBS for the province of Ontario.) I found this host reel of his and knew I had found the perfect final piece to make Sad Kids actually work. He was on a kids show about cool jobs.
AS: For the live segments, it was 50/50 scripted and improvised. Every Shane chunk was loosely outlined, and had clear beats, like it needs to end on Shane segueing into the next cartoon, etc. We’d figured that the people who actually make the interstitial segments on kid’s TV don’t have the time/preciousness to heavily plan or rehearse, so we shouldn’t either.
AL: We only shot for a day, I booked out the big studio space at my school and spent more days assembling and painting the set then actually shooting. We probably spent about 8-9 hours shooting. There are about 3-4 segments we ended up cutting (mostly for the better.)
5) The “twist” ending really got me. Was that always the plan to break out of the show like that? What was the effect you were going for / what kind of end impression do you hope / think it leaves viewers with?
AS: The original ending was an animated scene of an adult going on a walk after having watched all these Sad Kidz TV clips online and ruminating on nostalgia, then just like going to bed. I felt it was too masturbatory so we rewrote/re-shot the ending...to be more like the weird lonely feeling you got once you stopped being stimulated and Frasier came on (No disrespect 2 Frasier) and you’re left being this dumb little kid with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
AL: I hope it leaves viewers with a craving for Kraft Dinner lol.
Bonus question) What else are you working on at the moment?
AL: Hohohohoho wouldnt you like to know…
AS: Yes, yes we are.
AL: Boy oh boy are we.
AS: Oh man you better believe it we are.
AL: We’ve been writing a script for our next short that’s based off of old NFB documentaries from the 60’s teaching children and teens about how to deal with weird specific emotions in life.
AS: I’ve been directing and co-writing on a web series called A Boy’s Memoir. You can watch that here if ya want: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4Pnu-hCJRw5256wwvhQLGQ
No pressure. Whatev!!!
AL: I’ve been plugging away at self-publishing comics in NYC, and I am planning a comic reading/film screening show for the end of summer. It’ll be a hullabaloo of everything we like to make and see!!! All of these are under the banner of “Sensitive Athletes” our little collective that’s slowly growing.
Contact Info:
Alexander Laird
Email: alexander.j.h.laird@gmail.com
IG: @alexanderlaird
Alexander Swift
Email: amswift23@gmail.com
IG: @superclassyalex