In tandem with the news about Metro’s success, the BYU College of Fine Arts and Communications is pleased to announce a new series of interviews with BYU student and faculty creators and communicators, beginning with the director of Metro, Jacob Wyatt, and its composer, Michael Wyatt. Jacob Wyatt graduated in 2012 from the College of Fine Arts and Communications with a BFA in Animation and now works as a storyboard artist in Los Angeles. Michael Wyatt, his brother, studies linguistics in the College of Humanities and works as a producer for Thinking Aloud at BYU’s Classical 89 and as a music journalist for Utah arts blog Reichel Recommends.
Jacob Wyatt, Director
What inspired you to create the film?
The idea started in a subway station in Milan. After descending several different staircases and escalators I was waiting for a train looking up at this steel grating above the platform with all this empty space above it. wondered what was taking up all that space above me. So I started idly doodling these little fantasies about the things that live between the subway and the street, and thought it would be fun to do a story about a kid trying to catch a train and getting lost in the sort of dream-world at the edges of the metro station.
What personal meaning does it have for you?
The act of making Metro meant a lot to me at the time. I'd been involved in making these two other movies that just sort of fell apart because of a variety of reasons, and I had come to fear that I just couldn't make a movie. So making Metro, finishing it, sending it out, broke a bit of a bad streak for me, ended this line of unfinished projects and unrealized hopes. And then the story itself, the ending particularly, is me trying to work out how I feel about art as a career, as a lifestyle. There's this sort of selfish, ridiculous aspect to it, to making your own little stories and pictures and acting like that's a real job and convincing yourself that it's okay to make a living doing this stuff instead of something practical and productive. Plumbers, teachers, cops all help people in real and concrete ways, and what art and entertainment contribute to society is less quantifiable. Some movies and art and novels really do contribute to and change the world – and some art/entertainment is very parasitic, and takes a lot more from society than it gives back. So some of the anxiety I feel about that is expressed in the film. Most people I've talked to seem to think the fox is right to do what he does, but I'm still on the fence about him.
What are your favorite memories from working on the film?
Working with my brother and my friends. I either was or became friends with everyone who worked on the film, and I really enjoyed getting help and input from those guys and seeing people send amazing work back. I'd send the animation I'd done to Chris or Joey, they'd send it back with the effects and camera moves put in, and it would be this whole new creature. watching the music change the whole thing. For so long it was a completely soundless thing that I worked on, and seeing it with Michael's music made it an entirely new experience for me.
Why do you think this film has been so successful?
First off, my wife and the school have been really great about helping to promote it, Kelly Loosli in particular. Aside from that, I feel like it's open-ended and vague enough that people turn it into whatever they want. Every time someone tells me what they took away from the film I'm always impressed, because it's more what they brought to the experience than what I put into it. The lack of detail in the design of Prudence, the girl, and the fox, and the station – it's fuzzy enough that people can resolve it into what they want or need it to be and walk away happy. I didn't plan for that – I'm not that clever – I'm just lucky it just turned out that way. That and the music. The music is just fantastic.
What was it like to work with the composer?
The composer, Michael Wyatt, is my younger brother, and working with him was one of the best experiences of my life. We'd always had our own interests and abilities, his in music, among other things, and mine mostly in art. Being able to put those together into one whole was really satisfying. We'd had childhood fantasies about this kind of stuff, you know? Let's make a movie. I'll do the pictures, and you can do the music. That kind of thing that kids do. And we got to do it! Also, I'd known since we were kids that my brother was immensely talented and really special, and so it was great to be able to provide him with a platform of sorts and share what I know about Michael with everyone else. He's been composing things for ages – he wrote me a requiem for my childhood when I turned 18 – but had never really pushed to find an audience, and so I was really happy that we've been able to share the largest stage either of us has ever had so far.
What are you doing now? What are you aspirations?
I'm out in Los Angeles doing storyboards for film and animation, which has been highly educational so far. It's nice to be involved in these larger, big-budget productions and see how Hollywood movies and TV shows are developed and made from the inside. Once I learn how all this works, I'd like to make some feature-length movies of my own. But I think that's a ways off. Lots to learn. A few friends and I developing screenplays around our ideas between jobs, and that's a lot of fun. In the mean time, I'm making comics, working up ideas for another short, and enjoying what LA has to offer.
Michael Wyatt, Composer
How did you get involved in the project?
Back in 2010, my brother Jake asked me if I wanted to write the score for an animated short he was thinking of making. I, of course, agreed. Pretty soon he had a choppy, black and white animatic for me to look at. He said that he wanted the score to be a mixture of “Clair de Lune” and “Rhapsody in Blue.” I was kind of baffled by his request. The only common denominator I could find was the piano. So we agreed on a piano-only score.
What were your musical inspirations for the score?
After a lot of thinking and listening, I realized what he wanted was a sense of awe and excitement in the music. He really wasn't interested in a jazzy score at all. So I started looking into Debussy's harmonies. I spent a lot of time dissecting his “Sarabande.” I also looked a lot at Fauré's piano music before I turned to yet another great French piano composer–Satie. If the audience is at all familiar with Satie, they'll pick up on his influence immediately. Although I throw in some rhythmic variations from the get-go, the Metro score still has those signature seventh chords and 3/4 time from Satie's Gymnopedies.
What was it like to work with your brother?
Even though Jake isn't a musician, he was really good at directing my composition. I mentioned that the animatic was black and white, so I had no idea about the amazing color palette he would be using. So in my original score, when Prudence (our heroine) first came up into the pipe world and when she saw the mural at the end, the music was kind of slow and boring. Jake asked me to step it up, and as soon as I saw the colored backgrounds for those scenes, I understood why.
What was the recording process like?
When it came to actually record the piece, it quickly turned into a Frankenstein of a score. I'm not a very good pianist, so I was looking for someone to play it for me, but I couldn't find anyone. So I sat down and tried for hours to get a clean, well-timed performance. It wasn't happening, and the producers were getting pretty tired of me. So they called in the very capable Ty Turley-Trejo, who was working for BYU Broadcasting. He recorded everything after 1:33 in the movie, but I recorded the bit at the end for the credits. Actually, Jake even got some of his piano playing in there. When we were editing the music, there was this really awkward pause that crept up right at 1:33. I wanted to just get a single C in there, but it just wasn't happening. So I took Jake into the HFAC with my crummy ZOOM microphone and had him play just a single C. I snuck it into the original recording by way of GarageBand, and the producer (who was against the idea) was none the wiser! Although it sticks out, I think it was better than having nothing for that long. So anyway, although Ty is the only credited pianist, there were actually three, and you can hear them all within a three second clip of the film.
What did you make of the great response to the film?
Up to this point, I had only ever thought of Metro as a fun little project that my brother, our friends, and I had worked on mostly for kicks. I hadn't really thought about what other people might think about it. And it wasn't until I saw it in BYU's Final Cut Festival that I saw it in an audience beyond the people who worked on it. I was honestly a little alarmed. I heard lots of people laughing during the screening, and I thought they were laughing AT the movie. And when it was done, I heard a girl behind me say, “Oh. I get it. It's ARTSY. Artsy fartsy.” Up to that point, I hadn't considered that there was something to “get.” I was mortified. I assumed everyone hated the film and thought it was ridiculous. Then I started to hear some other feedback. At the second screening, Jake ran into a group of people who showed up at the end (so they wouldn't have to buy a ticket) just to see Metro a second time. Not knowing who he was, they recommended the film to Jake. “You've GOT to see it!” In that second screening, people were laughing too, but I figured out that they were laughing because they enjoyed it and connected with the emotions of the film. Then we won the judge's award and the audience favorite. I was told later that we won the audience choice by more than twice the votes of the next runner up. We went to Village Inn afterwards to celebrate, and a group came up to our table and said, “Are you the Metro guys? We LOVED it! We were talking about it the whole way up here.” I thought, “How? The thing isn't even five minutes long. How could they have been talking about it the whole way?” And then I kept being surprised by all the festivals Metro was not only accepted into, but invited to. The biggest surprise was when it won Best Short Film in the Nantucket Film Festival. Not “Best Animated Short.” Not “Best Student Short.” Not “Best Attempt at a Moving Picture by a Group of Amateurs.”
Why do you think the film resonated so much with people?
All the while I've been trying to figure out why it connects and resonates with people. Ultimately, I think it has to do with it being a very impressionistic work. It's all about the emotions. There's no dialogue, no sound effects, and not even any faces, so the entire story is told with gestures. The more I watch it (and I must have seen it hundreds of times), the more impressed I am at how Jake could communicate so much with such simple things like posture and timing. But I really don't think the story could have been told any other way.
What are your feelings about the project now that it’s done?
This has been, by far, the most satisfying project I've ever worked on. It was an absolute joy to work so closely with my brother, who, turns out, is a GREAT director. We had so much respect for what the other was doing, and we had great communication despite both of us not really knowing much at all about the other's field. Jake's off doing storyboarding in Hollywood and I'm prepping for law school, so I don't know if we'll ever get to do something like this again, but I'm hoping against hope that we will. I'd instantly drop anything to work on another of his projects. This may sound pathetic, but I have never been happier with the effect my music had than when I stumbled across a Tumblr post where someone had embedded Metro and written this as the caption: 'So beautiful. Oh, and the music <3”. Watch Metro here.