Sometimes all you want to do is bring your racist babe to Starbucks for some of that sweet, pumpkin spice coffee.

@elijahdaniel on “X”

Short Commentary

When I started developing my fall slate of shorts, I had locked in a good portion of ideas that I wanted to make. One of the issues, however was that I wasn’t sure which ‘Post-Processing’ ideas would make the cut. Rather serendipitously, my brother called me, initially over a separate topic, and then I asked him what he thought about a few of the ideas I had for the fall slate. I had told him about a previous idea I had for a fall themed short, but it seemed to have fallen a bit flat. Afterward I decided to read some of the screenshots that I saved of popular tweets and one came up about a silly order at Starbucks. He seemed to be more receptive to that, but not fully and then I remembered a story of an SPLC official dating a neo-nazi.

Link: https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/splc-official-accused-of-funneling-12-million-to-informant-in-neo-nazi-group-report-department-of-justice-southern-poverty-law-center

The cogs in my brain started churning until I merged both that news story and the previous tweet into what you see today. When I made that adjustment to the idea and told my brother, he had a much heartier laugh, which gave me all the information I needed settle on this idea.

The major goal of making this short was to see if I could recapture the spirit of a previous short I did this year “Are You A Fascist?”. That idea was very popular on instagram and I figured it’d be fun to develop a political style of shorts without being overtly partisan. There’s a time and place for that sort of thing, but really I think the cool thing about art, is that it’s a different way to ruminate on subjects. Where some people do political content online, they tend to want to generate controversy. I would rather the art I make that has political undertones be seen as entertainment and a point of interest for people to ask “wait, is this true or just a joke?”. So the aim isn’t to offend, but to reveal things that are happening in the world in an unassuming and hopefully, surprising format.

That said politics can be inherently offensive, and as I’ve learned with my “Are You A Fascist?” short, if you make art about controversial subjects, you ought to always have your sources prepared for when the pushback arrives. People feel less targeted if you can back up your claims. It won’t be convincing to everyone, but for those who are genuinely curious, it does help. In general I don’t particular like doing overtly political shorts, but in this case this was perhaps the most interesting point of this project. Trying to strike a balance between humor, and what might be a very touchy subject, and using an innocuous tweet as the avenue of delivery was a difficult balancing act. On top of it, when the production was wrapping up, I had an idea for an extra layer of humor: what if the barista, was black and was made to seem like the racist, and then that gets subverted with the reveal of the nazi boyfriend? It was a completely spontaneous idea that made me laugh and I had to go back and re-render all of her shots. Initially the barista was a ‘white color’ (I put these in quotes because, while the NPC’s are white, they aren’t always white presenting in the shorts mostly due to laziness on my part), but I felt it didn’t make much sense for their undercurrent of antagonism since the SPLC character and boyfriend were also white colors. Having the barista be brown gave just the right amount of irony to the situation that I was looking for.

Overall I did enjoy this project. There are more things I wish I could have done, especially regarding the setting to make things more fully envisioned but I don’t mind the simplicity too much either. The production time was short at only about 2 active days as well (which is a record). I was able to achieve all of the goals I set for myself for making this short, and I think that’s a win.