Constructing Strawberry Mansion

Leticia Sim

October 21, 2021

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In the fantastical world of Strawberry Mansion, humans and anthropomorphic creatures co-exist in absurdist fashion. It’s only fitting, then, for the animals—both inside and outside the film—to tell the story of the movie’s conception.

*This article was originally published in our 2021 Programme Booklet. It has been adapted and reformatted for the web.

Kentucker Audley (left) and Albert Birney (right) on the set of Strawberry Mansion via Talkhouse

“The Marvel of DIY filmmaking”—that’s what Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt touts the wildly imaginative and luminous high-concept breakout feature Strawberry Mansion as.
While putting together a high concept fantasy flick with an indie film budget, it often felt like directors Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley were merely chasing a pipe dream.
“Throughout filming, our mantra was: ‘This is our last movie’, ” Audley writes in his Talkhouse essay.

The Gorilla

Scene from Sylvio (2017)

The filmmaking duo first met in-person on the set of Alison Bagnall’s Funny Bunny. Birney, the unassuming boom operator, had quietly gained a sizable following on (the now defunct) Vine. His claim to niche internet fame was a character named Sylvio, a man in a cheap gorilla suit who never talks nor changes his facial expression. He was technically the most famous person on set, with over a million views and hundreds of thousands of followers, a fact that leading man Audley still finds amusing to this day.
“One day, I suggested we translate his character into a film. Having spent the past ten years of my life making hyper-naturalistic mumblecore films in Memphis, I was ready to switch it up,” Audley writes.
Their creative kernel had popped—together, Sylvio jumped out from Birney’s phone right onto the big screen. Well, as big as a dialogue-less indie film could go.

An example of an early sketch compared to the final composition in the film of the terrifying Blue Demon via Albert Birney & No Film School

Even then, their first collaborative film showcased hallmark features that would come to define the duo’s cinematic output. Highly stylised, achingly tender, and wondrously inventive, Sylvio the gorilla’s perpetually blank and unmoving face conveyed a bittersweet and inventive strain of humour while navigating an absurd yet familiar retro-pastel world. Most strikingly, perhaps, was the film’s ultra-low-budget.

The Fly

In a simultaneously tongue-in-cheek yet earnest Instagram post, Birney shares a curious still from Strawberry Mansion. It’s a dinner plate with vegetables strewn across the dish. A closer look would reveal a small fly.

Taken from @strawberrymansionmovie via Instagram

“An early first draft of the movie was written in Rochester in 2010. A small scene involved a fly. In 2011, I moved to Pennsylvania and tried to make the movie but it stalled out. I never stopped trying to make it, but I was beginning to think it wasn’t going to happen,” he writes.

In the summer of 2014, Birney found a dead fly under a desk while visiting his friend in Rochester. It was serendipitous—the fly was perfectly preserved. He placed it in a zip lock bag and scribbled “please don’t throw away, this fly is my future”.

“It felt like as long as I had this fly, the movie was still in reach. And maybe this fly felt special to me because I found it in the same city where the idea for the movie first took hold of me. I moved around a lot and the fly always moved with me.”As the years went by, the fly moved to a sturdier home of a box in his desk drawer, only adding to Birney’s mounting guilt. It’d go on to star in his short animation, Buzzer, and subsequently a cameo in his animated series, Tux And Fanny.

Still from Tux and Fanny

Finally, in the fall of 2019, after five years of being haunted by a corporeal dead fly, Birney and Audley started filming Strawberry Mansion.
Birney ends off the tribute post: “It only makes it into this one quick scene, crawling on the dinner plate. And after animating this scene, the fly was covered in food bits and falling apart so I finally returned it to the soil. Thanks fly.”
Less than a week later, the account posted an announcement of the film’s premiere at Sundance 2021.

The Caterpillar

Throughout Strawberry Mansion, a stop-motion caterpillar slowly traverses around a globe.

“We basically invented an entirely new character as a way to connect two parts of the story together,” Audley tells No Film School.
As the caterpillar crawls and jumps around the world, it ties together the framing narrative of a hero’s journey and the film’s ridiculous whimsical dreamscapes. It only seems fitting, then, that the small but important creature embodies the very essence of the film: Collaboration and the magic of ragtag DIY.

An example of some of the practical stop-motion effects used against a DIY green screen setup via Lawrence Becker & No Film School

“For the caterpillar, (our stop-motion artist and brilliant animator) Lawrence Becker found a pipe cleaner…and used some cotton balls to add splash texture. And then we composited that into the ocean shots, adding some additional digital splashes to marry the two. The ocean shots, by the way, were stock footage drone shots that we purchased to give ourselves a bigger scale than we could afford.”

The Chicken

Audley’s character loves fried chicken so much that he keeps dreaming about it. In a scene, he sits in a Pepto Bismol pink room, completely alone with nothing but a bucket of fried chicken wings that his “Buddy” hawks to him. “Juicy and delicious!” he remarks, taking a massive bite and smacking his lips in smug satisfaction.

Still from Strawberry Mansion

Audley’s despair is both deadpan yet ridiculous.

“Well, shout-out to the chicken wrangler. That was my brother, who as long as he’s been alive, has been a chicken wrangler. Just by his very nature, he loves chickens. I’ve filmed with chickens before for Vines or short films, and he’s always my go to if I need help,” Birney tells Indie Memphis.

“Yeah, that is a big element in the movie. And…it wasn’t necessarily intended to be that big of an element. When you get something stuck in your head, it’s just hard to get away from it,” Audley adds, alluding to the onslaught of advertisements that plague our lives, repeatedly feeding us the same corporate message. He points out they only work when they have a receptive audience: You, me, Audley’s character.

The Rat and Frog

Taken via @strawberrymansionmovie on Instagram

And of course, the film’s stand-out rat sailors and saxophone frog waiter deserve a special mention. With their fur masks and paper mâché heads, their prominence makes the film feel more like a collage of materials, ideas, and people constructing a scrapbook house of their imagination.Birney notes: “Well, I had some drawings very early on which I found on an old Tumblr account which goes all the way back to 2011 where I had some of the earliest characters like rat sailors, a frog waiter, the blue demon, and the VHS tape suit people. And once Kentucker and I started working together, it just began to evolve and become more of a collaboration at that point.”

Taken via @strawberrymansionmovie on Instagram

“When I came to the project, you know with the script, I didn’t quite one hundred percent understand it, but I thought the drawings and ideas really spoke for themselves and just thought, whatever movie that those drawings are part of, I wanted to be a part of bringing those materials to life,” Audley says.
As their drawings and sketchbooks come to life, Strawberry Mansion reveals itself to be the pair’s love letter to life’s small things—living and dead—a microbudget cosmic journey into the boundless potential of our wildest dreams.

Taken via @strawberrymansionmovie on Instagram