Logan Migliore Junior, philosophy
Alexander Payne: Junior, film
Masked Moose Films is a two-year-old project created by students Logan Migliore and Alexander Payne. The duo makes short films and music videos inspired by people’s everyday struggles. They shoot guerilla style by ambushing abandoned buildings and parking lots. They pay their actors in pizza. To watch their movies, find them on Facebook.
DL: What sorts of movies do you guys make?
Logan: We make music videos; we make movies out of short stories. And it’s not so much that we try to make a specific type of movie — it’s more that we try to make something that is thought provoking or different. It might be heavily action sequenced. For example, we made a movie based on the video game “Half-Life,” so there was a lot of fighting zombies. Then we made another movie that was more like a psychological thriller that dealt with this guy’s memories.
Alex: A lot of it is other film. What we find that happens a lot of the time is our films will boil down to the basic question of identity and losing your identity. And really two major films that deal with that, that we use for inspiration are Flight Club and Momento. So we just like to look at a diverse selection of films for not only ideas for plots and subplots but also for technique and things we would like to figure out how to do.
DL: We’ve all probably had moments in our lives where we lose our identity in some way. Why do you think your films focus on a loss of identity? Have you guys had that happen to you in your lives?
LM: What it boils down to is the fact that in the long run you’ve got your identity, and it’s kind of a security blanket for some people. And when that’s taken away from you — like one of the worst feelings is not knowing who you are or what you’re doing or deep philosophical questions like that. And since those seem to bother people so much, it seems to be what we grasp onto so tightly. To strip these characters away from that, really, it’s sort of a character study of humans in general. When you take that away from them you’ve got this sort of shell that’s willing to go to any sort of length to discover what that identity is. In the long run, if you’ve got a character with no identity and it’s not resolved by the end of the movie, then it’s a really sad feeling.
DL: How do you guys represent that vulnerability and loss of
identity in music videos?
Alex: Before we started working together, we both did two music videos. The one that I worked on was a video for this song “Life 2: The Unhappy Ending” by a band called Stars. What the song talks about is how the main character, they want to live this sort of idealized life as they see it portrayed from film. And how their regular life is just completely contrary to what they think it should be. In the music video, how it works is it’s the main character telling the story and then it will switch back to the main character as film hero. At the end he thinks the best sort of fate is to die dramatically for a cause. And in the end in (reality) he ends up just ruining his relationship with his life and ended up being alone because he can’t come to terms with reality.
DL: How do you guys choose the songs you make videos for?
LM: A lot of times I’ll just use the Internet tool StumbleUpon or I’ll take Pandora and I’ll find things that I haven’t listened to before and even things that I don’t generally like, so that way I can try and draw a story from something that’s outside of my comfort zone. And I think that really helps to expand in coming up with new and original ideas. You can get sort of locked into this cycle of making the same movie over and over again. For a little while that happened to us where we made the same movie twice.
AP: I enjoyed it both times.
LM: I enjoyed it both times, too, but when you’re trying to tell different stories to keep people coming back, and you’re trying to express yourself, it’s not really conducive to that. So we’re trying to expand because, as someone putting out art, you need to be taking in art, too.
AP: As far as choosing music or songs that we want to make videos out of: A lot of times before I go to sleep, and right on that verge of when you’re about to fall asleep, the songs that really inspire these images in my head, those are the ones that I want to pursue. Even if it’s just one still frame or whatever, if it’s especially vivid or anything like that, I think it’s worth going after.
DL: What is your process for shooting these videos? Do you guys have casting calls and a script?
AP: For the most part we try to do a script. Sometimes we’re more successful than others. But usually we end up with some sort of written thing that we can follow just so we don’t forget to shoot a scene, because that’s always fun, to be editing and find out that you’re missing something crucial. But as far as casting goes it’s kind of who’s available, at least for the extras. And for the speaking parts, we have a pool of people we draw from.
