Haymaker: The Manifestation of Two Men's Musings

Haymaker is a short film that I am co-directing with my good friend Rustin Mehrabani-Farsi. We began in the late summer of 2023, spending hours combing through ideas, finding reference footage, and drawing very rough storyboards for what would be our senior capstone project. While deciding what story we wanted to direct, I could not help but think of the story that brought us together in the first place. The story of Haymaker began in July 2023, but the story of its co-directors began a long time before that. Before there was the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (AHT), there was the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications (ATEC). Before there was Rustin and Jacob: Co-Directing super team, there were Rustin and Jacob: Modeling and Texturing I classmates. The meeting of the minds took place during the COVID era, more specifically in our online class during the Spring of 2021. We became quick friends, suffering together through our CG artist growing pains while having great laughs. As we progressed through the levels of ATEC classes, we grew increasingly confident in our artistic abilities. Suddenly, Autodesk Maya did not seem so confusing, and Nuke’s node-based compositing was starting to make sense. We were getting better with every project, feeling more and more confident that we were going to break into the industry fully knowledgeable and ready to hit the ground running. 

With our newfound expertise and go-getter attitudes, we were primed and ready to join a production. At the time, ATEC’s Animation Lab was producing a comedy short called Bad Timing. For both Rustin and I, this was our first experience working on an animated short. Bad Timing served as an invaluable experience for learning to manage expectations, take direction, and work as a unit rather than individuals. We also realized, begrudgingly, that we were not nearly as good as we thought we were. Going into Bad Timing, Rustin and I felt invincible. Sure, we knew we needed some more experience and were excelling at comparatively easy assignments, but we felt blindsided by the new constant juggle between our internal passion for creating and the artistic insecurity that we felt working on our first production. 

As a result, we looked up to the other more experienced artists on our team. Their knowledge of how to light shots and composite renders was phenomenal as well as frightening. We could not help but feel that these more experienced artists had expertise we would never have; that they had figured out their role and understood their craft marginally better than we felt we possibly could. This artistic brick wall still served as a constant reminder that there was always going to be someone better than us. Despite our battle with imposter syndrome, we persevered and pressed onward into our future projects. 

It is easy to look back on Bad Timing, our first production experience, and write off some of these feelings of inadequacy as a lack of experience or as a moment of fragile ego from two young men. Still, retrospectively, I muse about where these ever-present feelings of insufficiency and dissatisfaction come from. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear to me that these misguided feelings of self-consciousness stem from a societally imposed standard for artists to constantly be producing, to continuously be pushing the limits of ourselves and our technology, and to be the most outstanding creator in the room. The result was an implication of competition between peers: a foregone conclusion of eating or being eaten. So when Rustin and I came onto the production and saw how immensely talented some of our peers were, it felt like we had been lapped; left in the dust grappling with how we could feel so defeated about something we were both so passionate about.

After opening up to our artist friends about our experience, it became quickly apparent that we were not the only people who felt this way. We soon discovered that our burden, and the burden of every artist we know, was having our work inextricably tied to our value as people. Only after continuing our journey did we both realize that the way to become better artists was to divorce our value from our output, to realize the disparities in our creative output do not mean that we should stop doing what we love, but that we should challenge our boundaries of self-expression and skill. The antidote to overcoming unhealthy comparisons is practicing self-confidence and appreciation while striving to excel.

So, how does our capstone project, Haymaker, play into all of this? After many conversations about what kind of story we wanted to tell, Rustin and I fell back on our friendship and shared experiences as artists. We decided to explore questions through the film that we and every friend we have made in college had struggled with at some point. What do you do when you are not the best anymore? How do you respond when someone comes along and shows that the art you have poured your time, attention, and heart into was not good enough? These are big questions to consider exploring in a short film of our scope, so we had to strip it down to fundamentals to focus on one character’s internal struggle with defeat. Hence, our protagonist was born: a stand-in for ourselves and every artist we have ever worked with.

However, that was not all. We had to put our heads together to solve another very important problem: how do you explore the internal musings of an artist on-screen and make it feel relatable and engaging? Our solution was to keep the theme intact while changing the surroundings. The tormented artist became the disgraced middle-weight champion boxer, the film and games industry evolved into our boxing ring, and the always-unreachable artistic standard manifested as the title challenger. We wanted our intent to remain intact while forming the receptacle of the theme into a more captivating story to watch. While it is true that a large part of our audience won't necessarily relate to getting physically smacked around by an opponent in a title match or will not have tirelessly trained for the chance to reclaim their belt, they will know the feeling of torturing themselves to try and make sure every detail meets their highest personal standards. For a lot of artists, some moments in our profession often feel like a gut-wrenching punch. This would be the vessel of our theme statement and the way that we visually represented our story.

After a couple of months of deliberation for idea testing, concept creation to map out our short, and pitch refinement to get other artists on board, the story and heart of Haymaker had been fully realized. A story that visually entertains and thematically implores its audience to reflect on their struggles with disappointment and shame. A story about accepting your defeat and allowing it to make you stronger by resisting stagnation. A reminder that going down for the count does not prevent you from coming back ready to fight another day. This is what Haymaker is about.

Rustin and I are thrilled to be making this short film together and with our assembled crew of talented and dedicated artists. The progress we have made thus far reassures me that this film will resonate with people and shed more light on a common struggle we all share. We cannot wait to share all of the hard work and love put into this project with you in May 2024.