BarfQuestion Postmortem

Tales of BarfQuestion was born out of a difficult time in my life. Film school (or at least UW-Milwaukee which I attended) had turned out to be a complete scam which actively punished creativity, and yet I still received massive amounts of pressure to remain enrolled at the personal cost of tens of thousands of dollars. I was told repeatedly by the faculty that I would never make it with the kind of stuff I wanted to create, and I felt betrayed and conned by a system that seemingly existed to crush my imagination while milking me for money I didn't have. A lot of what I created was born from lashing out against this establishment and a society that felt like it was just trying to funnel me into soul-crushing work for the rest of my life in order to pay off the student loan debt it coerced me into accruing.

With "the Closing Hour", I won a film festival accolade on the same level as the senior-most professor at my so-called university and proved to myself that I could make it on my own. I dropped out halfway through my third semester, and with invaluable support from NewGrounds and funds squirreled away from ongoing part-time work, I was able to animate full time and pay off what debt I had accumulated during my short time at college.

Characters like SuperVillain embodied this ongoing crusade against a system that I, in my shortsightedness, felt had failed me. Yes, art education is largely bullshit and yes, I attended a particularly terrible excuse for a school. But no, there wasn't anything really holding me back; society as a whole was not out to get me. I had, and took advantage of, numerous opportunities and resources that loads of other, far less fortunate people just didn't (and still don't) have the same level of access to. I think this self-centered angst is what the budding alt-right scented in my work - seeing it as something potentially sympathetic to their ill-informed grievances. However, I had been fighting tooth and nail to achieve my dreams, while they instead had elected to throw entitled shit fits at every opportunity and use the internet to try and make everyone as miserable as they were. 

Music videos commissioned by wailing white men did not help this issue at all. My most popular work by a mile, it pained me to see so much interest toward wallowing in self-pity. I tried my best to positively spin each song's message through my animated visuals, which eventually culminated in "the Faster the Treadmill". Fetusaur was meant to show that shirking all personal responsibility - in favor of hero worship escapism - was a self-defeating 'effort' because Puddlenaut was just as much a part of the system as Fetusaur was. Upon learning this, Fetusaur flees the game and confronts the player: a salaryman who is trying to similarly escape his misery in video games - their silent confrontation a kind of accusation aimed at people who have dreams but do nothing to achieve them (like Fetusaur had been doing). Precisely one comment out of thousands picked up on that. Oh well.

For some time I had wanted to fulfill my childhood ambition of making a feature film and was growing tired of the constraints that BarfQuestion's slapped together world-building created. Now add to that the 2016 election nightmare and finding out that a disturbingly large portion of your audience, ostensibly the people you work for, were fascist friendly bigots. I was out of there. I quit. Off to make a trilogy of films based on three of my series, or so I said. Over the first year of production, the little SuperVillain remake that "Zehkiflorn" once was conceptualized as slowly shriveled and died, while a new vision blossomed out of the remains. The reveal trailer is so completely misleading at this point that I can only use one or two shots from it anymore. Anything of value in the previously promised "BarfQuestion film trilogy" has been cannibalized and reworked into what "Zehkiflorn" has become. And what "Zehkiflorn" has become is very likely going to be my life's work. 

  

No longer simplistic stick figures, the Zehkiflorn are now visually distinct from their BarfQuestion predecessors - sporting a detailed appearance, physiology, life cycle, and relationship with their ecosystem. Despite what I suggested online, this is no longer a parallel universe to Tales of BarfQuestion and has no connection whatsoever to my previous body of work (despite a few similar designs and concepts here and there). Most artists I've seen have a tendency to produce variations on the same story, the same themes, their entire career. Why not just deliver it all as one product at full potency? I can already see bits of BarfQuestion unconsciously popping up here and there, so I am certainly no exception to this pattern.

Every morning I sit down to work on "Zehkiflorn" and am presented with a new challenge, some new scene to break down and choreograph. Every month of full-time work produces 1-2 shots depending on their size, and at the end of each month I get to see how the film has inched forward. Despite how that sounds, it's incredibly rewarding - and certainly more rewarding than busting ass over a rushed and formulaic animation, posting it on YouTube, and getting a handful of thoughtless recycled 'joke' comments in return. I've discovered that I function far better without feeling like I need to answer to an audience. That's not even getting into the issue of how the internet has become structured to kill anything original in favor of quick, disposable content in the form of navel gazing vlog cults and channels dedicated to mindlessly consuming media. Nothing with even a shred of creative integrity can keep up with these trends. In addition, Danielle and I still work on games as a hobby, but they're for our own amusement and so they aren't released to the public. After the collective shrug our website redesign evoked (a project we are still extremely proud of), it just seems like a waste to expend so much effort in catering to others that don't share our vision.

I don't expect that "Zehkiflorn" will make it big, or even be well received. At times it is pretty combative, inflammatory, and not at all ego-reaffirming - criteria which disqualifies media from all but the most niche cult followings. That's not even taking imagination into account either - a quality that people are increasingly unable to digest and simply shrug off with offhand accusations of drug use. The level of detail in "Zehkiflorn" is hyper-dense and I hope it will reward repeat viewings - with viewers continuously noticing new aspects each time. My viewers, however, still haven't noticed that plastic objects weren't affected by Sock's radiation in "Empire" (explaining why a sealed hamster cage was an effective prison), so I don't expect these aspects of the film to go down well - instead serving to alienate audiences even more with an overwhelming barrage of information they have no interest in picking apart. I honestly don't care anymore. This film is for me, and working on it full time these last three years has been far more fulfilling and engaging than anything else I've worked on.

I'm still planning to stick to my policy of no internet updates about the film (well, besides all this). Despite already not using social media, I've been slowly removing the internet from my life even further over these three years. It was hard at first, but now I can't even see how I used it in the first place. I feel like a stranger on my own blog and the idea of posting anything feels incredibly alien and uncomfortable. I like living a calm life, unfettered by the cacophony of entitled bigots shrieking about their countless outrages and insecurities. I don't remember getting any substantial backlash when I animated SuperVillain brutally murdering George W. Bush with a ballpoint pen, but I can't even imagine the cavalcade of idiot bawling a similar animation involving Trump would evoke today. 

So that's it. BarfQuestion Films and its subsidiaries are closed, all pending projects canceled. I've moved on to my new career at the Zehkiflorn Conservation Society. I won't be answering any comments or mail regarding this post, but thank you for your support over all these years, unless you're a nazi - in which case I hope you either stop feeling sorry for yourself and get your life together, or just pull that trigger and skip ahead to your own personal ending. Spoilers: you die bitter and alone.

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tl;dr Q&A for illiterates, plus a few more quick answers:

Q: What's going on with the trilogy of films?

A: Everything but "Zehkiflorn" is canceled. "Zehkiflorn" is a feature film that will likely be my life's work.

Q: So what about "Rictus of Sock"?

A: Canceled. Anything of value has been cannibalized and reworked into "Zehkiflorn" (which isn't much). 

Q: Is "Zehkiflorn" a SuperVillain movie?

A: No. There will probably be the odd similarity here and there, but there are no canonical connections to my previous BarfQuestion body of work. 

Q: If it's not a SuperVillain remake, then what's it about?
A: Mainly fungus. Themes include the tangled relationship between altruistic and xenophobic impulses, unwarranted self-importance and magical thinking, animal welfare and over-consumption, the cosmic horror of genetics and the increasing probability concerning the non-existence of free will.

Q: Who's doing the music?

A: I don't know, and it's too far in the future to concern myself with right now. So far everything in the film is just atmospheric ambient noise and I'm liking that a lot more than any music I could put over it.

Q: What about Sulek?

A: They're having tons of kids and don't want to be associated with all the infanticide and child abuse in my work (which will also feature prominently in Zehkiflorn). They've said they want to make more music, but are incredibly busy with their offspring. I haven't heard from them in years, and their website is down, so I'm not sure how that's going.

Q: How much work are you even putting into this?

A: Forty hours a week, every week (except for normal holidays). I've been doing this for three years and that's produced a little over four minutes of finished content. I complete 1-2 shots a month. I'm expecting the film to be at least forty minutes, but who knows.

Q: Will there be any more updates?

A: Not really. I'll probably make a separate site for "Zehkiflorn" at some point and move Tales of BarfQuestion back to barfquestion.com (and remove the auto-redirect to zehkiflorn.com).  

Q: Are you not even going to show off the new design for the Zehkiflorn?

A: I'm not planning to right now. It's probably just paranoia talking, but even stuff as basic as some of my early BarfQuestion concepts got ripped off by more popular artists, so it doesn't seem like a great idea to upload something unique when I'm this attached to it - especially when the final product won't be released for decades.

Q: That's it?

A: With YouTube becoming actively hostile towards content creators and making them legally and financially accountable for Google's mistakes (specifically their failure to comply with COPPA), I may not be around on that platform too much longer. I'm positive these new regulations pose zero threat to me, but I'm not too keen about earning money for evil megacorporations that enact such unethical policies (this being only one of many scummy moves YouTube has made over the years). But this is all more of a hypothetical anti-update, so nevermind.

Q: So where is Zehkiflorn going to be uploaded?

A: Real life, physical venues like film festivals and maybe home media. I don't intend on giving it away for free. You're going to have to at least put the effort into pirating it.

Q: Fuck you, I deserve unlimited free entertainment!

A: Gross!

 

 See you in 20XX...