Michael Ashton: Creator Behind Lazy Teenage Superheroes Speaks!

In the six days that it’s been online, $300 budgeted Lazy Teenage Superheroes has proven to be something of a hit on the internet, due to its stunning visual effects and the laugh out loud banter between its protagonists. If you haven’t seen it already, do yourself a favour and check it out here where we featured it this weekend. Then once you’ve done that, make yourself comfortable and enjoy Comic Booked‘s chat with the man behind the hit: creator, producer and director Michael Ashton himself!

Mike, for those that don’t know, tell us a little bit about yourself – am I right in saying you predominantly work in visual effects?

Yeah. I’m from Ohio originally, I went to Brown University and I was always interested in the field of animation and visual effects, but going into college I’d never experienced actually doing it. At Brown I took a class every semester with the same Professor – Ed Huff – he gave me probably my best lesson to date, which was ‘keep making stuff‘. You know, he said ‘go out and experiment, it doesn’t need to be good, it doesn’t need to be long. Just keep making stuff and keep learning‘, and that’s kind of what I did with a bunch of my friends in the back yard, we started just making little videos and I got a little bit better, and a little bit better and ultimately that’s what I used as my demo reel. I got a job out in L.A. with a production company and worked there for two years then started freelancing, went and shot Lazy Teenage Superheroes, and here we are.

Congratulations are in order, I see the video’s just hit over 100,000 views on YouTube!

Yeah, we’re cooking now, I guess.

Did you expect this kind of reaction when you uploaded the video?

You know, I was hoping we would get a little traffic, I wanted to get it online so I could get it to the right people. I wanted to get it online for people to check out, and like it, or hate it, so be it. Just the ability for people to see it.

You created the concept and co-wrote the screenplay. Where did the inspiration for the Lazy Teenage Superheroes come from?

I had the idea a while ago. It’s not the most original concept, obviously within the superhero genre there’s so many subgenres – drama, comedy and horror and all that stuff, but it was a reflection on something that I wanted to see; something that had been done decently, but off here and there. Now I’m not saying Lazy Teenage Superheroes is a masterpiece by any means, definitely not, but I figured I was able to put it together and try to make it. It’s just a reflection of where we were at, I was in college when I got the idea. Anyone who likes superheroes has thought ‘what would you do with X superpowers?’ What would you actually do? Sure, there’s the obvious, like go save people and fight crime, but in reality there’s probably some downtime inbetween those episodes. What would you do to just have fun and hang out with friends and do what you normally do in your day to day life with the advantage of superpowers? I wanted to keep the superpowers real to the genre, I wanted to keep it as real-world setting as possible. Keep it with serious superhero effects, but have these guys have a bit of a lack of moral responsibility, which many teens do. Ultimately it’s about the characters and the progression of the story, and just something I wanted to see.

The short is peppered throughout with comic book references throughout, so I take it you read comics yourself?

When I was little I was obsessed with visuals – movies or whatnot, I would be interested. I used to collect Wizard magazine – in the same way that if you collect baseball cards, there was a baseball card bible book, Wizard for me was like the bible for comic books and the superhero genre. There was no actual comic book content in there, but it did have the visuals, and this ‘comic book’s getting turned into a movie’, and ‘here’s the storyline of this comic book’ and I always collected those. It wasn’t until later on that I actually started digging into comics themselves, I’m always up for any kind of recommendation. Any kind of Batman, Superman, a lot of Frank Miller. I usually go into a comic book store and ask whoever’s working there to recommend something, because ultimately they’ll know better than I will. But I am a fan of the medium. Our society has made really great superhero products and really poor superhero products, but it’s exciting to see that it’s still alive and people keep making stuff, and I’m happy to put a little dent into that category.

Was the whole production a family and friends affair – did you know your cast and crew prior to production or did you seek them out?

I had an opportunity to go shoot at a warehouse in Rhode Island, and almost all of the cast and crew are either current or alum of Brown University. I found actors on Facebook, I got recommended some actors through somebody in the theatre department of Brown, and I went through and picked the ones I thought fit the part, lookwise. I met them the day before we started shooting, we read through the script – they had just finished finals, and we put it together in a few days. In terms of the crew we had the actors, myself, a cinematographer buddy of mine then two or three other guys just to help out – some friends of mine. So it was very much run-and-gun. We didn’t use any lights, we didn’t have a dollie, we got a shopping cart in the warehouse, we just winged it. I didn’t really think this was, you know, my masterpiece, I just wanted to make it and see if we could do something that was fun and get all my friends together to work and have a fun weekend together, and it was! It was great and a huge learning experience. We squeezed out a pretty nice final project.

So the shoot wasn’t so time consuming but the bulk of the production time was creating the effects?

For sure, we shot it really fast. We didn’t have any sort of budget, I just spent enough to keep people happy and to stick around, then I took it back home with me and sorted through it and slowly started to chip away at it.

The whole short is an amazing showcase for the visual effects that run through it – from what I understand it was just you and one other person responsible for them.

Yeah, I did pretty much all the effects – there were two shots that a buddy of mine helped me out on, the two big ones: the final scene and the shot where Laser Wing flies through the window. Those were two shots where we were like ‘there’s a good chance that these might not work.’ We shot them, we got everything we needed, so we thought ‘let’s put those together first and see if they work‘ and if they did, we figured everything else would work. If those two didn’t work then we didn’t really have a project. But we got them, they worked and I was really happy with how they turned out, so we started there. I did all the editing and sound design, a really good friend of mine scored the piece, and it was back and forth from editing to visual effects and just slowly piecing it together.

How long did the whole short actually take to make from start to end?

I worked on it part time, so I was freelancing just trying ro pay rent and everything, so probably about seven or eight months or so. It was off and on, there would be a month where I would work on it more full time, there’d be a month where I took it off completely, but seven or eight months.

During the sequence with Ty fighting the ninjas, it seems to me that a lot of the effects seem to be drawn from video games. Would that be fair to say?

Sure, I drew from a lot of places where I saw fit. That whole sequence drew from Japanamation and video games, I like the balance of real world setting, but kind of taking the viewer on a stylistic rollercoaster ride, where the world is real, but not so real that you have to say ‘well wait, that can’t happen in real life‘. It’s a superhero movie and I think the great thing about it is that you have the opportunity that you’re looking at the medium not through somebody’s eye but as a layered project, so slicing the film screen, or dirtying things up, I’ve always really been into that camera manipulation. If you look at Michel Gondry and directors like him, he’s the King at taking you through this warped vision, where the screen that your watching is as much a physical element as it as a viewfinder in the world he creates. So I was just messing around with that – it’s a dream sequence, it’s what Ty wishes he could be, so it’s great to have a little bit of free reign to explore cool effects and different styles.

And thanks for bringing the Nintendo Power Glove back into fashion – I haven’t seen one of those for years!

Oh you gotta keep the Power Glove. I was really hoping, and happily surprised, that there would be some comments about the Power Glove, it was a little shout out to my 1980s video game playing.

It’s been six days been since the movie went online, how’s the reaction been so far?

It’s been great it’s been really kind of crazy and exciting. I didn’t think it would get picked up as fast as it did, I guess it goes to show that the lovers of the genre exist online and how strong they are in supporting things. There’s been a lot of support, a lot of great criticism and a lot of conversation back and forth, which is great. I always love seeing when people are actually having a somewhat civil conversation online. It’s been exciting, I’m just trying to keep up with it.

My favourite frequently repeated comment about LTS, the one I see everywhere is ‘it’s better than The Cape‘. I guess it goes to show that you don’t need a massive budget or a star cast to make something great when you’ve just got moxie, but it must be heartwarming to hear comments like that, surely.

Yeah, I take it all with a grain of salt because I think people like to stir it up a bit, which is great and exciting, but I’m not going to claim that it is or it isn’t better than any other project at this point. I made it as a vignette into a bigger world and as to showcase what’s possible with little money, and few people and a good potential idea. But it is exciting, I really appreciate the support from everyone, and the gameplan is to keep people happy and keep making stuff.

Well, with that being said, what is next – do you see yourself doing more with the LTS, could it be an ongoing episodic thing, or is there another idea in the pipeline?

I have a few ideas in the pipeline, but right now with the support and people’s interest in seeing more of this, I definitely want to make more. I’m not entirely sure where that venue’s going to lie – I think we’re at a point right now where webisodes and online content are going to make a really hard push towards fighting with television and film. I think with the devices out there that allow you to watch –  YouTube, Hulu and Netflix – all these things online streaming from the internet, you can watch YouTube in 1080p, and it’s really nice looking. At this point I’m interested in continuing the project and seeing if I can take advantage of that technology, because it’s a great one about to make a push here real soon, and I think Lazy Teenage Superheroes could be a great project for online content that you view on your television. Obviously in my second round for it I want the production value to be better, the effects to be bigger, maybe work with a pinch of a budget and just see where we can go with it!

Thanks to Michael Ashton for taking the time to talk with Comic Booked.

Tags: colin bell, lazy teenage superheroes, LTS, michael ashton, Movies & Television

About the Author

Written by Colin Bell

Raised in Scotland on a diet of Tintin and 2000 AD, Colin Jefferson Bell enters his 28th year on Planet Earth as one of the world's foremost experts in comic books that take place in his home country, and maintains his corner of the internet at It's Bloggerin' Time!. Colin Bell appears courtesy of his wife.

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