What is the film about?

During an earthquake, two statues in an art museum finally hook up – defying the laws of religion, society, and physics. This is a story about love, lust, and the beauty in letting go of regressive messages about our bodies and our desires.

What influenced it?

My primary influence wasn’t a film, but this quote from Butch Hancock:

Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for someone you love.

I love the way that humor can disarm and criticize, and wanted Yearn to do the same. Through this film, I’m processing and poking fun at the harmful messages that the church teaches about bodies, desire, and sexuality.

I also read a book while I was working on the film, called When Religion Hurts You by Laura E. Anderson, which helped me refine the themes that I was trying to convey.

And of course, a few particularly beautiful museums helped shape the setting and visual aesthetic of the film. The Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco and the Musée Rodin in Paris are two of my favorites and I drew heavily from their interior design, lighting, and overall vibe. And I visited the Utah Museum of Fine Arts with family while working on the film, and it was from a few statues there that I drew inspiration for the specific sandpaper-y marble material of the main characters. You can look at endless pictures online for inspiration but nothing compares to going in person and looking at things up close.

A little background information...

I was raised in a conservative evangelical Christian community. The messages about abstinence, “purity”, and lust that were drilled into us from childhood were incredibly harmful, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized the deep effect that those messages had on me. Purity culture takes what should be a gradual process of growth, exploration, and experimentation and turns it into a binary on/off switch — your sexuality is turned off until marriage, and then you turn it on and hope for the best. This film explores the frustration that can result from those toxic messages, and shows that there can be beauty in letting go of them.

How was the film made?

I created Yearn in Cinema 4D and After Effects. At first, I just wanted to learn how particle and physics simulations worked in C4D, and had an image in my head of two statues kissing and crumbling. From there, it ballooned out into a short film as I realized that I had a more personal story to tell.

I challenged myself to tell that story without any dialogue or traditional character animation, using only creative movements and camera angles of inanimate objects interacting during an earthquake. There’s a mix of chaotic physics simulations and more bespoke keyframed elements – the statues in particular were mostly keyframed so I could direct their movements more precisely.

Everything took a solid month to render on my home PC, during which time we got multiple notices from our utility company that we were using too much electricity. In compositing, I added a whole lot of smoke and additional debris in After Effects with a mix of Trapcode and stock elements.

Without dialogue, the music and sound effects became even more important for helping to tell the story and heighten the emotion, both dramatic and comedic. My good friend Anthony Ferraro created an incredible original score that did just that. And another friend, Bijan Sharifi, took my jumbled mess of temporary sound effects and recorded a whole soundscape of his own. The earthquake rumble was, apparently, a Theragun vibrating against different materials and slowed way down. And cinder blocks and stones became the sounds of marble impact and friction.

In total, this film took two years to make (in fits and starts, alongside my full-time job).