First and foremost Brandon McCormick is a storyteller, and it’s only incidental that he’s a filmmaker, film being the best artistic format for him to share his stories. “You think about history, our culture; you think about everything we assimilate, our relationships, everything revolved around story—the stories we’re creating, the stories we’re telling each other,” he says.

With his short Flicker and the Fringe, McCormick tells a hopeful story, one simple and yet full of depth. A mix of poetry and storybook animation, the film emphasizes the importance of raw and uninhibited belief, a message necessary these days for more than just children.

SM: Let’s start out with the basics, which, I guess, for any filmmaker is: How did you get into filmmaking?

BM: I started when I was fifteen and plugged into a local church down here in Lawrenceville, Georgia. They had a camera and a computer, and they didn’t know what to do with it so they just let me go play, pretty much unsupervised. I was a fifteen-year-old kid, in the back and just started making films, actually submitted a few to a film festival and started winning awards. So, I was like, “Hey, maybe I can do this for a living.” So I just kept on keeping on, and eventually was hired to do filmmaking full-time and then I started my own company Whitestone Motion Pictures and really have been doing that ever since…So far I’ve gotten a couple hundred thousand dollars invested into the company, things are going well, we’re making films and we’re looking down the road to hopefully a feature film in the next two years. That’s the 30,000 foot view of the whole thing.

SM: Now, you guys have a pretty idealistic and wonderful manifesto at Whitestone based on a Joseph Campbell quote, “May we rise with the mantel of myth, not as merchants with gold in our eyes, but as priests and shemans, holding sacred the power to forever change lives through story.” You see that a lot in Flicker and the Fringe. It’s a hopeful tale, a moral tale, a really playful way of looking at depression and anxiety. So, how is it specifically that you want to change lives through story?

BM: I’m a huge Joseph Campbell addict so I will recite back to you half of Joseph Campbell’s thoughts with a couple of my own mixed in. But, basically it’s just the idea that throughout history, morality, love, they’ve all been explained through story. That’s the central point.

We live in a culture today that’s explained everything away. Nothing’s magical anymore. Nothing’s supernatural or holy or special. The word I just love to use is magic. Everything’s explained down to the nano detail. There was a time when people would sit around campfires and talk about where lightening comes from. “It comes from the gods, and they’re throwing bolts of lightening.” A lot of it is, I’m looking to have children in a few years, and I’m looking to fill their heads with nonsense, just because it’s more fun to live in a world where magic exists. I still like to see the world as a very magical place. Just itself as magical. When I write, I often have the sense that this is not actually creating story. I’m just telling story, and story altogether is a magical experience.

Flicker and the Fringe I did two and a half years ago as my first ever little animated piece, but it’s one of my favorite absolute stories. People often are around you who tell you, “You’re just dreaming. You’re just hoping.” But, what if you could actually believe something? So, for me it was all about belief in yourself, belief in doing things. There are so many people in my life who are like the Fringe, who sit around and say, “Well, that’s a nice pie in the sky dream, but get a real job, get a life.” It’s just now in the last year or so that things are going really well, and I’ll say, “What if this is a real job? What if this is a real life?” Then, I guess, I do that for the guys that work for me and inspire them to become what they think they are. A lot of people define themselves by what they do, and if they can’t make a living, like I can, off of film, story or writing, people identify themselves as waiters or carpenters, which is cool for some people, but some people are more. They’re writers and musicians. I hope to look at them and say, “You’re not just a blue collar worker. You are also a writer.” So I try to inspire people in my team and my company.

SM: Like you said, in a capitalist society, the American society, we do define ourselves by whatever it is economically that feeds us. So, this dichotomy—or seeming dichotomy I should say—between a blue-collar worker and a writer say, it is definitely hard to capture that complexity in humanity and still allow it to be magical. Maybe the complexity in humanity is what’s magical, but at the same time I think that the complexity is what forces us, as we become adults, to ground ourselves in reality. That complexity is so difficult to understand that we need to hold onto something that’s tangible.

BM: And, with all of our science and information and all of the things that we can explain, there’s still the mysteries of love, of the heart, the mystery of friendship. So even Flicker and the Fringe is a myth, in my opinion, of the internal. It’s bottom shelf with the heart. At the end of the day, it’s a myth about why people would want to stamp this whole idea out that they could believe in anything special about themselves or about others. What if you had that one little flicker of a belief inside of you that ignite a change in your life or other people’s lives?

So, yeah, sure, we all know where lightening comes from, but we still don’t know what love is. We can talk about the chemical pieces of it, but that really doesn’t capture it. So, the great mystery is ourselves, and the last great mystery is each other.

SM: Getting into the nitty-gritty with Flicker and the Fringe, the poetr for it is beautiful in its storybook quality; it certainly felt like something a parent would read to a child as a bedtime story. It’s very hard, these days, I feel to write in that manner and not end up having it feel dishonest or cliché. So, how did you do that?

BM: I knew that the audience for Flicker and the Fringe was going to be an adult audience when I first wrote it. So what I wanted to do was write it to sound like something that children would really love but that adults would hopefully see the layers of—the metaphors and the messages that we tried to write in.

I feel like everything I write comes from a child’s perspective. I attribute that to not doing a lot of college. I’m still pretty young. I’m 23, still pretty young in life, so I feel pretty authentic when I write from a child’s perspective and therefore towards children. At the same time, I feel there are things that I want to say about the world that I live in.

When we sat down, I read a lot of Suess, I love a lot of the Tim Burton types, and so I sat down to immerse myself in that language and rhythm. I sat down with a lot of really talented people, writer Billy Wilkerson and my friend Donna Whitten, and we spent a few weeks together. I would write the story overall, I’d write some of the language, and then they would help me in these certain spots where it was rough. So, it was very collaborative in what it was. It was probably one of the most fun writing processes we’ve done. We just knew we were writing something really cool, and then we got Ernie Johnson, who’s a sportscaster we know to come into the studio, a high-end, professional guy, to lay down the track. He was jiving with it right away because it was so cool and so much fun.

SM: How did you go about crafting the animation?

BM: I brought in a guy, a good friend of mine Teddy Brothers, who is an artist, and had him draw up some of the conceptual art and development of characters. He nailed it. He draws kind of caricatures at times, and so I told him, “Make it a little dark, but let’s make it cool and kid-friendly.” So he designed it, and on the first try it was perfect.

He would paint on canvas all the actual scenes except for the backgrounds, and then I would scan them in at a crazy high-resolution. Then I’d bring them into my studio and in After Effects I would digitally take all the elements apart, and I’d add my own background, the motion background. Add some digital snow, and then I’d digitally move the camera. So, it’s not an animation persay. It’s more like a shadow box or diorama. It’s not “animation” although someday I’d love to see it as a real animation.

SM: Backtracking a bit to the emotional end of the story, Flicker, as an ember, is coming from the bottom up. What’s really interesting about this, and an inversion of what normally makes up these type of stories, is that the light part, rather than the dark part, is hidden. It’s the light part that has to move up through these layers. Why did you decide to focus on that inversion?

BM: I’d just finished reading Dante’s Inferno so that certainly is an influence in the layer thought of that world. One of my absolute favorite things to do in all of my films is to create new worlds, so we spent a lot of time creating these little places he would go.

And, probably the language of “deep, down in your heart,” really stuck with me. One of my first passes of this story was that at the very bottom left corner of your heart, in the same place that you put all your secrets, which is why (Flicker) lives in the Swamp of Secrets, is the place that you shove things that you don’t want to remember. It’s like the garbage pile of your heart, the very bottom. At one point when you were a child, and your heart was inflamed, when it was glowing, that is the center. I thought of that as the epicenter, as the top.

So the world you start into with Flicker is really a world gone wrong. The vibe is that “It once was like this!” and now it’s like, “this.” I felt that the Chamber of Light needed to be at the center because at the end, that’s what keeps you going.

SM: Definitely, as a child, that flame, that inspiration was the epicenter of mine, but progressively what would have forced that to the bottom level of my heart is socialization. What do you feel like that was for you, that as you became an adult, you found yourself fighting?

BM: I made this film at the same time that I made another film called The Alchemist, and they both deal with the same thing, the idea of purpose, the idea of other people cutting off my visions or my dreams. They’d say, “Oh, that’s really nice. Someday. Maybe.” It seems like everybody talks about those things, but I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. This is different. I’m actually going to do these things.” The reality is everybody talks about it, but until you do it, it doesn’t matter. So, for me, certainly what the Fringe represents is society, an outer community prejudging you.

I also had a lot of issues being young. At the time I was 19, a college dropout and owning a film company. People tend not to take you so seriously when you’re that young. And, I married very young, and so some of the time, I’d feel like, “Maybe no one’s going to take me seriously until I’m 30 or 40. Then maybe people will see me as a valued artist.”

Although I do look forward to being someday a craftsman at my art, I see that now I’m just in my infancy stages of what I get to do. I feel like I have a worldview that I don’t want to say is untainted but I would hope a little more raw than people are used to. That’s why my work sometimes comes across as more optimistic, more pie in the sky, utopian dreamer, but at the same time I do believe a lot in goodness, I believe a lot in redemption, I believe a lot in people’s ability to rise up and do something great, I believe in the inherent greatness of everybody.

SM: That’s a very interesting space being young and an artist.

BM: Absolutely, and I’m learning to see it a totally different way now. It’s a weird dynamic culturally, and I’ve thought this for years. There’s an emphasis on the super young and super talented,…an emphasis on the youth craze because everyone wants to see themselves as young and beautiful. Young people have mirrors in their homes, and older people have paintings. It’s that idea. We continually want to look at young talent.

So there’s that pressure, like “I have to have my masterpiece at 21. I have to win Sundance at 21, else I’m a failure. My life’s over.” I thought that for a long time, and even now as I’m getting a little older, I’m saying, “Well what if my masterpiece wasn’t until I was 60?” Maybe that’s okay. You look back at all the great masterpieces—Paradise Lost, John Milton, Dante’s Inferno or Homer’s Odyssey. All of these were practically written on deathbeds. These were craftsman who’d spent their entire lives devoted to something. Then you wonder why in the last hundred years, there’s been nothing created that’s as classic.

But, it certainly has been a very strange thought, and I struggled for so many years with, “I’ve got to win Sundance, or I’ve got to win awards early in order to make it.” It still goes both ways for me. It’s strange that you’re not taken seriously when you’re young, but they expect great things. Then you have to deal with the idea that you’re just walking potential when you’re young. Then when you get older, you’re no longer potential, you either are or you aren’t. And, so I get by on my potential, “Woah, he’s good. He’s got so much potential.” But, at some point that switches off, and you’re like, “Woah, he had so much potential.” I’m always terrified of missing that mark.

For more information visit www.whitestonemotionpictures.com.

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