Fantasia 2024: THE SECOND, Short Film Short Review

Editor Tony Zhou and Illustrator Taylor Ramos are perhaps best known for their YouTube channel Every Frame A Painting, their video essay side-hustle away from their day jobs in the TV animation industry.

 

Early pioneers in this space nearly a decade ago, there now many (many) channels dedicated to explaining individual films, or the process of filmmaking (or both) at length in this format; it is a sizeable niche. During the pandemic, Netflix and David Fincher gave them a limited run series, Voir, where they were the show runners, further carrying the Video Essay torch into the mainstream. (Personal aside: the Walter Chaw episode on Walter Hill’s 48 hours is the gem of that series.)

 

With their new film The Second, a narrative live-action short, they have gone one step further. Analogous to the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma more than half a century or more ago, they have decided to make their own film, to talk about film.

 

The result is a semi-formal, subtly playful story inspired by the 18th century pistols-at-dawn duels in Kurbrick’s Barry Lyndon. Only here, in the alternate universe of the short, the practice has continued into the 21st century. Then, and now, these antiquated rituals of solving grievances were of course dangerous things, but also smacked of vanity, absurdity, and futility.



Phillip (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, of Kim’s Convenience and The Mandalorian fame) is the eponymous Second, part advocate, part armourer, part groomsman, who drives his son to the proverbial field at dawn to participate in the pomp and circumstance, and eventual shooting match, against the aggrieved party. During the car ride there, he sees his son as both a child and man (this is in fact visualised literally), and you can see a father’s concern, even regret, that it has come to this.

 

A failure of sorts, from his point of view. The Second straddles the moment, a cusp of a father holding on to what he desires his son to become, right before the act of letting go. In some ways, a duel is like a wedding; in other ways, it is like a funeral. With well-dressed men in a fresh-cut field, which comprises the bulk of the 16 minute run time, it is not difficult to make this connection.



Over the course of his back and forth duties between his son, and his opponent’s second, it becomes clear from Phillip’s nervous stoicism, and his son’s need to prove something to his dad that, regardless of the duel itself, with all of its high stakes, juxtaposed on top the fussy ritual of the thing, the issues, like so many father-and-son relationships, will remain unresolved. Parenting is not an easy thing.



Shot in a wide-frame with mainly static shots, and scored with Bach, the film is unquestionably handsome, if a bit stiff. (Truth be told, so is Barry Lyndon.)  However, given their ‘explainer/communicator’ ethos, the short also provided a chance, at least at Fantasia, for Ramos and Zhou to give a 45 minute lecture on their creative process.

 

Titled One For Us, One For Them, and using The Second as a case study, the talk distilled in an organized, layman focused delivery, all their script notes, story boards, and animatics, to break down and explain the process of making the film, from how to sift and select ideation (keep a notebook!), to the rigours and intentionality of pre-production, to location and outdoors problem solving while shooting, and the dangerous ‘fix it in post’ mentality that can slip in as the filmmaking journey progresses.

I am confident (or at the very least, hopeful) that some version or another of this lecture, in a crisply edited audio-visual form, will end up as a video essay series. Which makes The Second a fun little bit of dual purpose. The title is both the ‘second act’ of their side hustle, as well as demonstration Ramos and Zhou’s business savvy, in they get to use their short in a second manner; as a teaching tool on top of a creative act of entertainment.