The Commons

A conversation with Kevin Franzen (@kevinfranzen01) and Matt McCreary (@matt_mccreary1), hosted by Egg Klickstein (@klickstein)

Egg: Thanks so much for making time to chat with me today, and congratulations on making such a lovely piece of art! I want to kick things off by asking how long you two have known each other?

Matt: I’m gonna say three years. 

Kevin: Yeah.

Matt: I don’t know where we first met. I think I had seen you around events and jams before we actually connected.

Kevin: I think we had passed by each other but never really interacted. Maybe three years ago we got eyes for each other and then started talking more.

Fishboy and Dr. Eel (Matt and Kevin) going in for a hug

Matt: Oh, I know, when the connection was made. It was at Ollerup jam. I think that was the first time we actually trained together. Immediately it was like “ba-ba-ba-ba” lots of ideas.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s true.

Egg: Do you think that has to do with the way your individual training styles had progressed through the years and your interests convening in a similar direction around that point in time?

Kevin: I think that maybe that was the initial thing that drew us together at that session. We wanted to try similar things, or build upon each other’s ideas. If I saw Matt doing something I would try it, and then maybe I’d get an idea from what he was trying, and then we’d explore that together. I don’t think that’s what made the connection happen, but I think that’s maybe what initiated the catalyst of the friendship. I think we were drawn to each other because we had similar tastes for stuff, similar ways of thinking and humor. All that kind of bonded together.

Matt: I think we both have an excitement for when we meet someone and there is this spark of this sort of back and forth ping-pong of ideas. Speaking for myself, I don’t find that often. It’s few and far between where I feel like ideas are bouncing off what someone else is doing. That’s what happened with Kevin, it was just immediate, like “Oh, you’re doing that thing. Okay, I want to do that too”.

Egg: When exactly did the idea to make a video together come about? I saw one of you guys posted an Instagram story of someone’s comment that said you guys should make a video together. Was that where this starts or somewhere else? 

Kevin: No that comment was posted like maybe three or four weeks ago. We started filming the video in July. So that comment came way after. And we just thought it was funny that they didn’t know. I think the first idea for the video came about at a different Ollerup jam actually. The idea started as just a joke about a video that we didn’t really have plans to make. 

Matt: Yeah, we just started messaging each other saying “When are we going to film this project?” 

Kevin: and there was no project. 

Matt: That kept going and kept going. And then eventually we were like actually we should do a project. 

Kevin: Then we started looking into locations and what we wanted out of the project, and yeah it came to be.

Egg: That kind of leads me into the unique dynamic of a duo video. I feel like it’s a type of video that I don’t see very often. Typically you get solo videos, or team videos. There’s a certain dynamic in a duo video that is really unique. I would love to hear a bit about what that process looked like for you two. Did you feel like your relationship movement wise was at the forefront of this project? How was that ping-pong of ideas you were describing at play here?

Matt: I think it was challenging because you never usually work as a pair in parkour, you usually work as a larger team or solo. So just having one other person was hard because we wanted to create some pieces we were happy with individually, but we also wanted to go out with the intention of creating combinations together. So there was a learning process of how to get involved with that collaborative creation. Also getting to know how Kevin works in a pair and how I individually work in a pair. 

Kevin: Yeah, we had not really properly trained together before this video. Up until then, it was just jam training, which is definitely different. When you’re not filming, you play around a lot more, and maybe you take a longer time. Since we had limited time for filming, and we were in places we did not live in, we had to kind of focus and really dial in and figure out how we functioned under stress while training and filming. I have a lot of experience filming with Kipa, but even there we film a lot for our own parts within a video. I’m not necessarily always thinking about the dynamic between my movement and somebody else’s. Whereas with this video, we really wanted the whole thing to feel syncopated. That made it more challenging, but it was a new experience and quite fun to figure out.

Matt: Yeah, and I feel like we were only getting the hang of it towards the end of shooting. We finally hit a stride- 

Kevin: -and then it was over.

Matt: But yeah, that’s part of the process.

Egg: It’s definitely an interesting balance with that playfulness while having limited time to pull things together. From my perspective, the video feels very playful. How do you view the importance of playfulness in your training?

Matt: I think it’s the root of enjoyment for me, as well as the root for creation. Without playfulness, I don’t think you can discover as much. It helps you go down a lot of different avenues. It’s about a childlike quality, where you’re not thinking about an end product or an end goal. Without expectation you can be in the moment, and you can let whatever is inside come out. Yeah, it’s a very important part of movement for me.

Fishboy and Dr. Eel (Matt and Kevin) getting playful

Egg: That’s beautifully put, but also very interesting in the context of making a video where you do have expectations, and you do want to have a final product that you’re proud of. Kevin, you mentioned that you had limited time. I’m curious exactly how much time this was shot over? 

Matt: We shot for roughly 19 days.

Kevin: Yeah, 19 days total, spread across two different trips. The first trip was for 12 days, the second trip was for 7.

Egg: Yeah, that’s not a lot of time. It came out feeling really cohesive for just 19 days. I’m very impressed with that.

Kevin: Thank you, we actually had to cut a lot of material from the edit. So we do have a lot left that wasn’t used. In the stress of having to make enough lines to create a video in a short amount of days, we actually ended up creating maybe more than we needed. It’s a hard balance of trying to get great quality in every clip while also getting a great amount of footage within a few days. That was definitely something we started figuring out more towards the end. Something we have to keep working on.

Egg: From my experiences filming parkour, when you’re trying to be playful and expressive compared to focusing on difficulty for example, it does feel a little bit easier to produce more footage that I’m proud of. There were a lot of really standout moments for me in the edit where it felt like maybe an idea wasn’t necessarily the most difficult thing to execute, but the idea itself was really entertaining and captivating. For example the clip where Kevin falls backwards on what looked like a trash bin of sorts. That was one of the more memorable clips for me. I think it speaks to that importance of playfulness. Knowing you and your skill level I imagine that clip didn’t take too long to execute, but it was a really fun watch.

Kevin falling backwards on the trash bin

Kevin: I mean you’d be surprised! it was quite scary. We tried prepping it different ways by having Ben hold me into it and making sure the fall would be slow enough. It used to fall quite slowly, but something in the container had broken so it fell really quickly. We had to start by having Ben hold the lid up with a chain. It kind of became a whole process. But it was really fun to try something like that.

Egg: Another clip I want to ask about is the Ender. There are a number of partner movements throughout this video so I thought it was a lovely choice to finish the video with one. Soon as you guys got into the starting position I was like, “I think I might know what’s about to happen, but there’s no way.” Yet indeed there was. I’d love to hear about how you guys landed on that idea and what the process of working up to that one looked like. 

Matt: Yeah, so throughout the whole time that we were filming, we had the thought in the back of our heads that we needed to find an Ender. We had no idea what it was going to be, we just knew we wanted something together. Like maybe one person does a move, then the next person does a move, or one move goes over the top of another move within the same clip. But we never really arrived at something where we both found an interesting enough idea. It came down to the final two days of shooting in Hamburg, and we still had nothing. We were sitting in the kitchen, and this topic comes up like “fuck we’ve got no way to end this right now. Maybe we could use this clip, or this duo line or something”, but nothing really stood out. 

Kevin: We wanted something quick, easy, outstanding and not a line, per se. That was quite difficult to figure out. It was in the kitchen, like Matt said, that we had this idea of maybe doing a suplex throw into a backflip. So we were like, “alright well, tomorrow we’ll go to the gym, because we don’t want to try this outside for the first time. That feels like a pretty bad idea, something might happen.” So we went to the gym and went up to the foam pit. It was quite quickly that we realized that our idea was quite hard. It was easy to get one person to rotate, but the person throwing the other just kept landing either on their back or on their stomach. It was just not very realistic to do that off of the actual spot we had in mind. So then we tried to see if maybe I could sit on Matt’s shoulders and we could both do a backflip. That didn’t work either. We started thinking that this might be harder than we had thought. Maybe we don’t have an Ender. Then we started experimenting more and I thought maybe if Matt stands forwards and I fall backwards that could work. We tried that, and that kind of worked immediately.

Matt: We chucked it into the foam pit and boom, it was working. We did it a couple more times then we put down some mats. I think on the first attempt we were both on our feet so we just kept going higher and higher until we were at roughly the same level as the spot we had in mind. It was going swimmingly so we drove to to the spot and got ready. It took us two takes, and we were done.

Kevin: I must add it was equally scary getting up on Matt’s shoulders every time in the gym. So going outside it was still quite scary. It was a weird fear compared to how I normally feel while training. Normally as long as you put in enough effort, you will make it. For this one I couldn’t put in much more effort than just sitting there and leaning backwards. So I really had to just trust that it would work in the moment, which was really fun.

Matt: Yeah, like putting trust into two counterparts that they’re both going to do their job correctly. Because if one does without the other, then both are fucked in this scenario.

Egg: This is so interesting to me. As parkour athletes, we work a lot on building trust in ourselves. I don’t see a lot of moments where you are trusting other people with your safety like that. It was a really beautiful metaphor of sorts for the video as a whole. I really love that you guys finished with something where not only are you relying on each other, but you’re doing slightly different things. This perfect equilibrium where you both still bring your own flavor.

Matt: Cool, nice. I like that perspective.

Egg: Another thing I need to ask about is the seagulls. What’s with the birds?

Matt: (laughs) Well I don’t think we really know. As the the characters of Fishboy and Dr. Eel emerged, then also came about this concept of having lore surrounding these characters. I guess it kind of grew from there where like we were characters and we saw some sort of superhero supervillain alter ego thing.  

Kevin: Yeah, antiheroes. And so we wanted a nemesis basically, and we settled on seagulls. And then we started going back and forth with names for the seagull. That’s the whole concept. 

Egg: I got that idea that they were a villain of sorts, but I’m still curious if there was a reasoning for the seagulls being the villain beyond you guys having ocean related names?

Matt: Well, Brighton is known for having thousands of very angry seagulls that will attack you, swoop down and steal your food. There is also a lot of graffiti of seagulls in the streets of Brighton, and shops are named after seagulls. There’s all this memorabilia surrounding them in Brighton. So I guess that solidified that character. 

Kevin: It is a thing where you go training on certain rooftops and if there are seagull babies you will get bombed by seagulls. So it becomes kind of a natural enemy for the people training in Brighton or on the shore of England.

The Enemy

Matt: Yeah. To speak further on the characters and such, as this concept developed, the more we wanted to create something that maybe future projects could then link with. So maybe this can be the beginning of a continued series where maybe other characters can be involved. Where we can create a little bit of a bigger picture.

Egg: Earlier, you said you felt it was close to the end of filming when you guys really hit a groove with how to make this work. With what you were just saying about leaving the door open for this being the start of a cinematic universe of sorts, do you think you guys want to make something like this in the future?

Matt: Mmhm, most definitely. 

Kevin: Yep yep yep.

Egg: Amazing. I want to ask about the soundtrack, which I know was composed for the video which is super cool. I want to hear how that idea came to be, and what that process looked like.

Kevin: Well, for the music, we didn’t originally decide on having original music. The idea was to have a mixture of funk, which is what Matt was listening to a lot during that time, and big band jazz which I was listening to a lot. I think we were both inspired by that music while moving, so the idea came to implement that into the project somehow. Once we knew we wanted to sell this to help pay the people involved in making it, we knew we needed either original music or really underground music. It’s hard to find big band jazz that isn’t licensed because it’s very expensive to produce. So we decided that it could be cool to make original music. We have a friend from England named Johnny, who trains as well. I spoke to him about the potential of making music and we started, cementing the plan. What he wanted was some part of the video so he could have inspiration for the music. Meanwhile our editor Lester is not used to editing without music, so he wanted the music before making the edit. Which created obviously, a little bit of a paradox. We solved that by making a really short rough cut, and sending that over to Johnny. Me and Matt created a playlist together on Spotify of music that we thought would be cool inspiration and sent that over too. Johnny then made the music and sent that to Lester, and he started editing. From there we’ve gone back and forth between editing the music and editing the video.

Matt: Yeah, I think throughout the whole process it’s been a constant back and forth of “maybe tweak this” or “that’s not quite hitting the way we want to.” Wether the song wasn’t merging as much with the video or the edit was not complimenting the music. Just like constant adjusting and tweaking and giving feedback on both ends.

Egg: That’s a super interesting process. I haven’t really heard of anything quite like that. The way that I edit is always heavily influenced by the music. I feel like I’d feel a bit lost if I also had the ability to edit the music itself. Starting to wrap things up here, are there any standout memories or funny stories from behind the scenes that I might not know from just watching the video itself?

Matt: I was sick for three days of the shoot. I caught the flu and I was reborn by getting thrown out of a shopping trolley across a gap.

Matt's "Rebirth"

Kevin: (laughs) Yeah I remember that. I had forgotten that was how we got you back into training. That was the first thing you did. You were sick and not training for three days, staying inside while I was out filming by myself with Ben. That’s kind of how we revived you.

Matt: Yes, this joke of a kind of rebirth. 

Kevin: We got in a street brawl in Brighton. A lot of weird stuff happened. Much more than we anticipated. I think that helped us get to know each other better, me and Matt. In a very short time.

Matt: Yeah. We were definitely put into some high stress scenarios. In a friendship, you can really get to know another person very quickly when you have these experiences.

Egg: Anything else you want to say before we sign off?

Kevin: I hope whoever reads this enjoys the video!

Matt: Special thanks to Ben Carm and Jack Dodds for helping to film and taking care of other things on the shoot. They did an abundance of things to help us make this project. Huge thank you to both of them.