In The Box: COVE (Illegal Alien)

This month’s Box program takes a look back at 2019 Ohio Shorts Jury Award winner, Ryan Wise, and his award-winning submission COVE (Illegal Alien). Made while Wise was a senior at the Wellington School in Upper Arlington, Ohio, COVE (Illegal Alien) is a clever combination of music video and Afrofuturist narrative inspired by the 1984 blaxplotation film The Brother from Another Planet. Wise, who is now in his second year in the Undergraduate Film & Television program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, wrote, directed, and performed in the film. Film/Video Studio curator Jennifer Lange sat down with Wise to discuss his film.

JL: Can you explain a bit more about the genesis of this film? You mention that it was part of your senior pro-ject at Wellington School which included a compilation album you made with other musicians from around the country. Can you tell me a little more about that? 

RW: To graduate from my high school you had to complete a senior independent project. For mine, I wanted to combine my two favorite things (music and film) so I originally intended to make an album and a short film to go along with it. To get some of the workload off of my back and also explore collaboration in a deeper way than I had ever gotten the chance to, I decided to make the album a compilation album of different young artists I knew that spanned the country. 

I was worried about the album lacking a sense of cohesion because of the diverse talent represented, so, to rein in the vision a little, I presented all the artists with the plot points of a fictional narrative and asked each of them to pick one of those plot points and create a song around it. 

The album ends up becoming a soundtrack to a film that only exists in my head and on some scenes I wrote for the project’s presentation. COVE is essentially a film from within that film (the protagonist is a filmmaker), which is why at the beginning a title comes up that says "Illegal Alien" by Ian Shepherd (the protagonist).

JL: What makes COVE especially great is that it’s a video that one might expect would need to rely heavily on really great special effects in order to pull off, and yet you managed to circumvent that expectation, using creative edits and even a little bit of humor to work within your limitations. Was this your plan all along, or did this decision come during production or post?

RW: I was very inspired at the time by the sort of lo-fi, DIY aesthetic you'd find in BROCKHAMPTON videos or early Spike Jonze work and knew that the adaption of said aesthetic would allow me to get away with unrealistic effects. That's a part of the reason why the film is in 4:3 aspect ratio, so that the older feel might ease audience expectation for state-of-the-art effects. The faker the laser eyes and super-speed look, the more aware of the editor the audience is. I think that aware-ness creates a feeling that I'm there with you as you watch the movie. Bigger budget films feel so distant.

JL: You're at NYU right now, just starting your second year in their film program. What direction has your work taken? Any new, unexpected influences or inspi-rations? What are you working on now?

RW: I'm trying to find myself in the black art space. Not in opposition to a "non-black" art space, but in congru-ence with the fact that anything I create will be class-ified as such. I'm not mad at that. I'm very inspired by Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Ja’Tovia Gary, Bradford Young, and many other filmmakers of a similar point in space. Work for school takes up a lot of my time, but outside [it] I continue to shoot music videos for artists and develop projects that'll manifest in the future.

The call for entries for the 2020 Ohio Shorts opens on January 2, 2020. More information is available here. 

Ryan Wise, COVE (Illegal Alien), 2019
5 mins., HD video
Image courtesy of the artist.