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Of Mascots and Men: Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickston Cole Tews on Hundreds of Beavers
Hundreds of Beavers The phrase “word-of-mouth indie theatrical hit” sounds as outdated in 2024 as “coming soon to LaserDisc.” And yet, the slapstick fur-trapping adventure comedy Hundreds of Beavers has graduated from its lengthy festival run to become that rarest of things, a star-free independent film that has already grossed more than double its $150,000 production budget during its self-distributed gradual cinema rollout (still continuing as of this writing, despite its release on VOD).
First-time feature writer-director Mike Cheslik previously teamed with lead actor/producer/co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews on the latter’s feature directorial debut, the black-and-white adventure comedy Lake Michigan Monster. In classic independent form, the two committed to another low-budget feature concept, one that Cheslik would direct and that played to their strengths—Cheslik’s skills in After Effects and Tews’s broad, likeable comic performance style—as well as their available resources (snow and trees, friends willing to wear mascot costumes and fall down). The ensuing film, Hundreds of Beavers, was shot over two years and tells the tale of a fallen applejack entrepreneur who must learn the trapping trade to survive. Impressed by Monster, fellow Wisconsin producer Kurt Ravenwood quickly came on board to source funding.
Advancing techniques developed in Monster, Cheslik eschews realism in favor of high-contrast grainy black-and-white images, unusual shot angles and backgrounds cobbled together from stock photography sites. With influences ranging from Guy Maddin and Karel Zeman to Chuck Jones and Harold Lloyd—to say nothing of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and The Legend of Zelda—and a creative fearlessness that recalls early Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, Hundreds of Beavers proudly owns its inspirations while somehow feeling like a true original.
I first encountered Hundreds of Beavers in 2023 at New Zealand’s Terror-Fi Film Festival, where Tews notified us via a pre-recorded introduction that it “wasn’t a movie at all.” Whatever it is that we watched, I laughed until I hurt, a rarity in recent times. It’s a film that works best in a crowded theater, which led the team to reject offers for streaming in favor of bringing it to enthusiastic theatrical audiences themselves. With the gamble well and truly paying off—Ravenwood and Cheslik were both in L.A. “taking meetings” when we caught up online—I wanted to find out more about how the three got here and where they’re going next.
Filmmaker: Mike, I’ve been digging into your past, and the earliest film of yours I can find is the 2008 short The History of Whitefish Bay High School on YouTube. Was this the first time you and Ryland worked together?
Cheslik: That’s right. Our high school principal hired us to do a promotional video, and we added jokes to it and got a lot of laughs that night from the parents. We looked at each other in the back of the auditorium and said, “This feels pretty good,” and kept working together although we went to different film schools. I went to NYU, and he went to UW-Milwaukee, but we had a similar sensibility. Now for our two features, it’s kind of nice because we have different networks from two different film schools. We know Milwaukee filmmakers, but we also know NYU filmmakers.
Tews: What did we make on our high school video?
Cheslik: I think he gave us $300 or something. That’s pretty good for high school—it would have been 150 Blockbuster rentals. I would ride my bike to the Blockbuster at Bayshore mall in Whitefish Bay to rent movies—I’d always have a big stack of movies that I would watch at night while we were making our high school video. That’s where I got into Buster Keaton.
Filmmaker: And what brought you together as friends before that?
Cheslik: I don’t know—Super Smash Brothers and drinking, and we both like movies? Ryland had made a 60-minute miniDV feature, Dark Chocolate, that I enjoyed, and he enjoyed my miniDV short film, Death by Cookie. And we said, “Maybe we could collaborate on an industrial film for the principal.”
Filmmaker: I was curious about how much Hundreds of Beavers felt like your first film versus feeling like the follow-up to Lake Michigan Monster.
Tews: Well, Mike worked just as hard as me, if not harder, on Lake Michigan Monster. Even though it was only $7,000, the movie took two years to make and felt like a big undertaking. But when Beavers happened, that felt like making three features in one.
Filmmaker: A lot of making a second feature is recovering from the traumas of your first feature and knowing what you won’t do again or what you’ll do differently. So, what were the lessons you took from Lake Michigan Monster?
Cheslik: The ADR process was very boring on Lake Michigan Monster, so we knew we didn’t want to have any ADR. But we also didn’t want to have production sound, and we weren’t willing to make the choice between the two. We decided to go back to the basics, back to the filmmaker I was when I was 15, to make [it like a] Buster Keaton silent film. Then, we built the film around our available resources: Ryland’s physicality, his willingness to do athletic stunts and my After Effects proficiency from ten years of broadcast.
Tews: And having a bunch of friends who are willing to dress up in animal mascot costumes and do physical labor and get cold for free. We had to buy them quite a bit of beer, I will say that.
Cheslik: Yeah, all the beaver boys are our buddies, and it was written [knowing] we had a deep roster of buddies who we were comfortable tackling in the snow.
Tews: There are hundreds and hundreds of movies that come out every year, so Mike and I thought, “No one’s trying to make a silent slapstick physical comedy in black and white in northern Wisconsin in the wintertime. Might as well be us.”
Filmmaker: I know Hundreds of Beavers didn’t have a formal script, but did you ever start formatting one and then decide that this wasn’t the way to build a film?
Cheslik: Yeah, we just don’t know how things are done, so we did it our way, which was a two-page treatment, and then we filled it in with notecards of drawings of gags. It turns out that’s the George Miller method. But at the time, we were just doing what we had done for the last 15 minutes of Lake Michigan Monster, which was doodles on note cards. We did two months of that, Ryland? Thinking of one gag every five hours for two months, sitting in our living rooms with these piles of notecards and pens?
Tews: We had a million ideas, then carefully selected the funniest ones and how they would all intertwine and connect with one another. But it was a slow process. It took several months of me going over to Mike’s place for eight hours a day, just figuring out what the hell this labyrinth of a story is and how to continuously not only make it funny but also achievable with our small crew. And [thinking], “Mike, can you do this in After Effects?”
Filmmaker: Did you ever say no, Mike?
Cheslik: It was a good thing that Ryland doesn’t know anything about computers, and I don’t know anything about the physical world. Ryland would pitch a gag that’s impossible to animate, and I would say, “I’ll figure it out.” That’s what makes some of the animation ambitious. Then, I would pitch something physical for him to do, and Ryland was just like, “Mike, the human body cannot!” But we’d figure it out, so that was our ignorance helping. We’re not going to make ignorance a policy, but it worked out on this.
Tews: We would have Samurai Jack, Adventure Time or Super Mario Galaxy on silent in the background. When you see other filmmakers and animators do a certain crazy idea, it really gets your mind going.
Filmmaker: And you eventually storyboarded the whole movie in Storyboard Pro?
Cheslik: Storyboard Pro is a vector software that exports to both a QuickTime movie and to a PDF storyboard that you can use on set as your shot list. I think it was two months with note cards; after that, it was me storyboarding scenes before we shot them [each winter].
Filmmaker: Did you think about the story in terms of world building and rules a lot, or was it just anarchy?
Cheslik: No, we don’t like anarchy. We don’t like punk music. We like rules-driven math rock.
Filmmaker: But more seriously though, the film is a balance between chaos and control. As a viewer, you have a sense that anything can happen, but at the same time, there’s this very careful mechanical sort of structure to it.
Cheslik: Yeah, rules are sexy. You’ve got to establish them and then just stick to the rules. One rule we had was that if something would hurt Ryland early on, then Ryland would use that physical Looney Tunes principle to help himself later. We wanted it to be a very, very slow process of him getting better at solving the puzzle that is the wilderness.
Tews: Usually in a movie they’ll show you a montage or something, and it’ll be a really quick way to see how [the protagonist] goes from zero to hero. But we thought something we’ve never seen before is showing the entire process of going around the trap line in “real time,” right?
Cheslik: Yeah, the structure is from fur trapping. You set a trap and don’t just wait to see if your one trap worked—you keep going around your trap line and setting more traps, and then you check them all again the next day or the next week. Let’s say there’s an environment like the icy river. Instead of doing the five beats of Ryland solving the icy river in a row, like sketch comedy or Looney Tunes, you watch the first beat of 12 different traps and then the second beat of 12 different traps. You lose half the audience, but hopefully, by the time you do the third, fourth and fifth beat there are some satisfying payoffs.
Filmmaker: That process reminds me of hanging out at friends’ houses and watching them play video games. You’ve been very public with your Letterboxd list of influences, from Donald Duck to Roy Andersson. But I don’t think there are any video game films in there.
Cheslik: Video game movies have the problem of taking something that already is a video game and then making it narrative and emotional, right? Whereas we’re taking a western or a Looney Tunes [cartoon] and adding video game elements.
Filmmaker: It actually reminded me of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in that sense of, the second act is nothing but training. You’re committing to this notion of watching this training in real time.
Cheslik: We talked about 36th Chamber. We were not going to have an elliptical edit where [Ryland’s character] gets better; we’re going to watch, one at a time, how he develops every trapping skill and gets to 100 beavers as if it’s a full video game. That’s been controversial. But we were a small enough movie that we were able to do that in an uncompromised way.
Filmmaker: Kurt mentioned in our interview that distributors said the movie is 15 minutes too long. Like, you’re supposed to have a 90-minute comedy.
Cheslik: I just thought if we made the poster look like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World that we would be citing historical precedent. [In its various cuts, the 1963 comedy has running times from 159 to 197 minutes.]
Tews: Yeah, and we thought that if instead of a 90-minute thing you see it all and it’s a bit longer, then the payoff will be so much grander at the end when he actually does get to hundreds of beavers. You’re really gonna feel you’ve been on quite the journey. People say it should have been shorter, but in that second act everything in that trap line is so dependent on the things that happen before, so you really can’t cut anything out. We obviously ramp things, made things faster, and Mike cut it razor sharp to keep the pacing going. But you can’t cut 20 minutes because, if you do, things won’t add up. There will be a lot of loose ends.
Cheslik: If you feel it’s too long, that’s actually a [story]boarding problem, not a post problem. One page of script equals one minute of screen time is kind of an accepted truth, but I didn’t exactly have that in the animatic. My animatic came in at 90 minutes, but the movie came in at 108 minutes.
Filmmaker: I feel that after a certain point, when you cut things shorter, everything just starts being the same pace, and that creates its own sense of fatigue. Whereas the gear shift going from the
second act to the third act invigorated me as a viewer and actually makes it feel shorter than 108 minutes by the end.
Cheslik: I appreciate you defending us, and I do want to say I’m not arguing with people who think it’s too long. If an audience member feels that way, they’re right because that’s how they reacted to the film. But we wanted to make it the nerdy video game second act, which I knew hadn’t been done in film. It was an experiment that I wanted to try.
Tews: And at the same time, we wanted time for it to slow down and breathe a little and take in the atmosphere.
Cheslik: Seven Samurai is my favorite movie, and we talked about Kurosawa and Samurai Jack taking little breaks, and you feel like you’re in the environment during those breaks.
Filmmaker: How much did you know about fur trapping before making the movie?
Cheslik: Ryland met a guy who did some fur trapping, and I asked Ryland about it at a bar.
Tews: We did our due diligence for a week and researched some fur trapping. So, in the movie there are actual fur trapping tactics, like the Spanish Windlass, done silly. Or following the beavers as they swim underwater and seeing the frozen bubbles in the river [and using them to place the trap]. That’s an actual thing that fur trappers do.
Filmmaker: You shot for 12 weeks, which if you’ve been going around these genre festivals sounds like an insane amount of time to a lot of other filmmakers, who knock out their film in 18 or 20 days.
Cheslik: Yeah, we don’t believe in a 30-person crew. We don’t believe you should emulate the look of a major Hollywood film. I like the indie game philosophy, where two guys make a whole game with pixel art and pick an aesthetic and a style that matches the scope of their budget and team. We believe in small and slow. Four people over 12 weeks can make a more interesting film than an indie trying to emulate a Hollywood look and only having 10 days.
Filmmaker: Well, being able to shoot the first act and then come back the next year for the second and third act, and presumably doing a lot of story development during that time, is an incredible luxury. Or had you already locked in the structure?
Cheslik: Things that were vaguer gags became more fleshed out in between the winters. Maybe you can tell watching the film that the first act is more experimental. It’s as if we’re figuring out the look. The second act has Quinn [Hester] as DP, and I’m a little more locked into what we’re doing. So, the quality of the second and third act, I think, is higher.
Filmmaker: How did you select the Panasonic GH5 as your camera, and what kind of glass did you use?
Cheslik: I ignorantly bought it before the DP was lined up, then handed it to the DP, and he said, “Oh.”
Tews: And what were the lenses we used?
Cheslik: It was the manufacturer zoom that comes with the GH5 and a wide-angle Laowa.
Filmmaker: So, what were the challenges of managing revisions with 1,500 After Effects shots? What were the things that you learned in that process of managing a technical nightmare of this size?
Cheslik: Well, we were in 1080p, so there’s not a big mess of proxies. It’s just [about] keeping the look really simple. I had done a lot of After Effects for broadcast—for Fox Sports, the Wall Street Journal and different marketing companies over the years. I’m not super skilled as a compositor—I couldn’t do a Spider-Man effects shot—but I’m fast in our style. I developed that skill on the finale of Lake Michigan Monster, where Ryland gave me a little control over that effects-driven sequence. For [Hundreds of Beavers], I just expanded those philosophies of slapping black and white and grain on everything to hide the shoddy compositing work, focusing on really strong shapes rather than high-fidelity detail or subtlety. The whole premise of the film is conceived around white negative space—having strong silhouettes against white. I was always telling Quinn, the DP, to move the freezing cold ladder that he can’t touch with his bare skin and climb up into negative 20 degree wind so that he can shoot down onto Ryland in the snow, and Ryland’s working to make sure his poses read to camera, making sure that there’s no emotional truth to the performance at all, that he’s really just a puppet and that his pose is reading as what I drew.
Filmmaker: Ryland, as a performer, are you finding, “What if I did this?” moments on set, or are you like, “My job is to be a puppet”?
Tews: As soon as I had any sort of stray thought, Mike, as the dictator he is, would shut me up immediately and say, “Stick to the boards, you fuck!” [laughs] No, there were times I had ideas that went in the movie, but the days are so short, and it’s so cold out that you do kind of turn your brain off a little bit and just try to hit the pre-planned poses and marks. We had so much to do in a short amount of time and a crew of four guys and everyone was freezing. So, there were never a ton of takes. I think the most takes we ever did was one of the “loose gags,” which were the least storyboarded sequences that just play out in the wide how they play out. That one was me sledding down a hill and taking out the beavers on a sled, then them coming and beating me up. We did that ten times or so because it was kind of fun, and we just needed to get me hitting the beavers right in the center of frame. There were only six loose gags like that. Everything else was laser-guided.
Filmmaker: When you say there’s a four-person crew, what are those positions? You’ve got a DP, Mike directing, Ryland acting, and the extras for the day. Who else?
Tews: You named it. The extras have to be the beavers, who also drive, [are] the crew and make lunch. Toward the beginning of the movie, there was some stuff where it was just me crawling around in the snow and Mike filming me. There were other days where you might have four or five guys. There are definitely film professionals on the movie, but by and large it’s a lot of buddies.
Filmmaker: Mike, can we dig a little deeper into your use of After Effects? Are there any tricks you have learned along the way above and beyond the style, either conceptual or pragmatic?
Cheslik: I don’t like plugins because your project is four years long and your plugin that you bought at a flat rate is gonna get bought by Maxon, then you’re gonna get put on a subscription fee for it and that’s gonna be $70 a month you’re paying just to keep your old effects shots operating while you finish your movie. So, I’m an advocate of vanilla After Effects. And every element should be practical but then combined digitally. The times we used [purely] digital effects, it was a compromise and not a choice. I also used a lot of Shutterstock. People are like, “Oh, the scale of the movie’s so big,” and it’s like, “Yeah, I shrank Ryland small, then I went on Shutterstock and searched ‘log.’ Then, I duplicated a log to make a big log wall, and then I made Ryland really small.” And people are like, “The scale of this movie!”
Filmmaker: At first, I was surprised that you shot a VFX-heavy film in 1080p. But then I thought, why would you shoot 4K if you’re probably only ever shrinking elements? You’re not blowing up a frame trying to steal a medium shot from a wide.
Cheslik: That’s correct. We were only ever shrinking and leaving data on the floor. I was adding grain and up to two pixels of blur to everything and blowing out the whites and dropping off the blacks. I was removing detail. I hate these wide latitude cameras and [filmmakers who] don’t make a choice. We’re just trying to make a strong image as quickly as possible because if you do every effects shot in two hours, you can have 1,500 effect shots in your solo movie.
Filmmaker: Was the grain an After Effects standard setting?
Cheslik: I bought some gray 16mm film grain elements and was just overlaying two of those on everything. It’s really not sophisticated. I’m not a camera guy, and I don’t know a bunch about professional effects. In every shot, I’m just trying to cleanly convey one gag with no extraneous information.
Tews: Part of making really strong images was shooting down at the white snow and not having literal underbrush in the shots by covering that up sometimes. Or shooting on a golf course, so we could have these really clean black-and-white images.
Cheslik: We did a lot of bad keys using a green tarp, which saves money because you’re not going into a studio, but then you’re wasting an extra six months cleaning up the keys.
Tews: There were some times that we just did not have money left in the budget to rent out a studio space. So, we just threw up the green tarp on a couple of C-stands next to the cabin, and whatever we got we got. Then Mike would clean it up later.
Cheslik: Ideally, there’d be the money to get a nice clean shot, but we had a crew of three people, so I was willing to say, a lot of the time, “Hey, Quinn, that key is good enough. Let’s move on because it’s cold.” But I paid for that later by rotoscoping Ryland’s ass for hours and hours.
Filmmaker: I read that you created the timeline in Premiere and then didn’t upgrade your computer for four years.
Cheslik: That’s exactly right. The computer I’m doing this [Zoom] interview on still has the operating system from 2018 in case I have to do Blu-ray features.
Filmmaker: And when did you start working on the sound design?
Cheslik: We still didn’t have the sound design in it until close to when we were going to debut the film. That sound design just elevates the whole thing. Bobb Barito, the sound designer, this is his Sistine Chapel. Beavers is my fifth movie with him. When we said that we picked this project based on available resources, the biggest one was Bobb, actually. We chose a silent film because we knew it would have Bobb supporting the whole movie.
Filmmaker: There are a couple of sound design moments that really stood out for me. There’s the bunny love theme, which I think is a theremin, and the first time the icicles fall, it’s actually screaming. They’re just such left field but perfect choices.
Tews: Actually, that icicle falling is an elephant.
Cheslik: We have all these runners [running gags], and you have to remember the last beat from the runner from 25 minutes ago, so [Bobb would] attach each runner to a unique sound effect. Before the shoot, Bobb developed what he called signature sounds, and I was doing the animatic using these signature sounds for effects, like the woodpecker and the spittoon spit. Those sounds are meant to help you remember a little physical principle that’s going to come back in this world. That’s one thing that Bobb did that’s great. And we love our hard cuts into and out of sound, or into and out of the De Wolfe library, like Monty Python did. So, the entire second act is based on how funny it would be to cut into and out of these recurring sound effects of this 12-step loop over and over again.
In the 1940s, Lou Costello would hit a prop or scream, and it would peak out [the levels on] the old-time microphone. We love that sound, so Bobb would run a lot of impact sounds and Ryland’s ADR through an old tape deck to get them to peak. And we were very opinionated on what kind of impact sounds are funny. I went to school with Joanna Fang, who did the foley for God of War: Ragnarök, and she did all the foley for the whole movie. We knew we needed high-quality foley. All the beavers are camel sounds. Bobb went through the camel library and found all the expressive weird noises that camels made and strung them together to match the emotion of the beavers in that scene, and he did that for the whole group.
Filmmaker: How long did all this take?
Cheslik: Nine months of Bobb’s work.
Filmmaker: How are you going to gear shift into something that won’t take six years of your life? Or is that just part of the process now?
Cheslik: Yeah, we have got to scale up. The Beavers model is hopefully repeatable for someone else. We’re done doing it this way.
Tews: I think the next movie is definitely scaled up, but we don’t want to lose that spirit and energy and that “shooting from the hip” that we’ve had for these first two. We want to be able to mix the two together so we keep our same sort of creative voice, as they say.
Filmmaker: One thing that’s really cool about what you guys are doing is you don’t seem to keep any secrets and are very open to sharing your techniques and influences. If, five years from now, there are hundreds of Hundreds of Beavers clones, but they’re, say, set in San Diego with Sasquatch, are you going to feel aggrieved or proud?
Cheslik: People should feel free to copy the style, especially doing a movie in grainy black and white. If people imitated Hundreds of Beavers, we’d be flattered because we’ll move on to another style, hopefully.
