Film: Fungi Forage
Directors: Cy Henty and Molly Brown
Writer: Cy Henty
Composer: Lobby Lud
Animator and Editor: Molly Brown
Starring: Lobby Lud (Offscreen vocals)
An animated musical number about the dangers of foraging wild mushrooms unless you really know what you’re doing.
In a new interview on Blazing Minds ahead of the Southend Film Festival, I got a chance to ask Co-Director/Writer Cy Henty and Co-Director/Animator Molly Brown a few questions about their film ‘Fungi Forage‘
You can watch Fungi Forage at the Southend Film Festival on Sunday 7th June at 12:30hrs as part of the MOSTLY MADE IN SOUTHENDPART ONE.
Q. Your film Fungi Forage has been selected to play at the Southend Film Festival. Can you tell us what we can expect from the film?
Cy Henty: Fungi Forage is set in a magical world in the midst of a quest where the central protagonist has fallen from a flying cow into the arms of a Gingerbread Gollum. It’s a brightly coloured surreal musical number!
Q. What were your inspirations when writing the script?
Cy Henty: Many years ago my mother went on a fungi-forage and told me about strange people looking through magnifiers at pin-head fungi in dung. As a keen amateur mycologist I also became aware of how easy it is to mistake deadly poisonous mushrooms for edible ones. I have always loved comic musical adventures growing up, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) to Yellow Submarine (1968). And although the song was originally performed for Watford Live in Watford High Street (with the cast dressed as medieval players) it had never been adequately recorded. I rewrote the script as a lockdown project and taught myself to audio and video edit. I then contacted a group of different artists,
musicians and animators from around the world who provided the sections which I wove together in a portmanteau animated film. As soon as I rewrote the script as an animation I had Molly Brown in mind as I love her unique aesthetic and sense of humour.
Q. Did you have any of the cast in mind for the characters when writing the script?
Cy Henty: Yes – the characters were all performers I had worked with before on the live performance and for a show at The Pleasance. For Fungi Forage the vocals and instrumentation were both provided by my long time collaborator Lobby Lud.
Q. What were some of your influences for the look and style of the film?
Cy Henty: Fungi Forage was originally intended to be a muppet-style puppet animation! Then a stop-motion! But both the animators pulled out. I had already asked my great friend and collaborator the brilliant Molly Brown to animate some sections of the longer portmanteau film and we have always shared a dark and surreal sense of humour – so I tentatively asked if she might have time to be able to animate this section too! Luckily she came through and her wonderful work on this quickly became my favourite and perhaps the funniest segment.
Molly Brown: Reading Cy’s answer above was the first I knew about Fungi Forage having originally been envisaged as a Muppet-style puppet animation. If I’d known about that, I might have well have had a go at trying to do something with puppets, but as things turned out I approached it as a music video combining (mostly) animation with a bit of live action.
Fungi Forage is one of several musical numbers in a longer film called The Grunting of the Watford Wyrm which was written by Cy and produced by The Electric Head, a comedy duo consisting of Cy Henty and Al Ronald. By the time Cy asked me to animate Fungi Forage I had already done two other sections of the film.
It started with Cy asking me to do just one musical segment, a number called A Grunting We Will Go. The song was a duet sung by Al Ronald and Cy Henty, with Cy as a singing cow. I asked Al to send me full-length photos of himself in various poses from every angle: front view, left view, right view, rear view, and I used those photos to make him into an animated character. For Cy’s character, I mostly just superimposed his face onto a cow.
Then, quite some time later, Cy asked me to do another segment which was quite a bit longer and was basically the denouement of the whole thing. This segment included another duet sung by Al and Cy (as a human this time, rather than a cow). I already had an animated character based on the photos of Al, but I didn’t have any full-length photos of Cy that would have worked for that character, so I had Cy send me photos of himself as the character in various poses from every angle.
I finished that second segment – called Erasmus’ Passage – and two whole years went by. I thought I was done with The Grunting of the Watford Wyrm, and that Cy wouldn’t dare to ask me to do anything else. But he dared and I ended up agreeing to do one more segment (if this was a heist film, it would have been: “one last job”) which turned out to be Fungi Forage.
The script called for Al Ronald’s character to be singing to a gingerbread man, and I not only had an animated character based on Al ready to go, I also had a gingerbread man which I first made back in 2012 for an animation called The Evil Table. I had also used him as an animated character in a music video for a novelty Christmas song by my friend David Fisher and then again in a film called Haunted Hospital. This gingerbread man had been around the block a few times and I didn’t want to be: “that woman who throws a gingerbread man into everything she makes” so I put a moratorium on using gingerbread
men in films.
I did not count on the fact that Cy Henty has a gingerbread man obsession. When we first met at the Horror-on-Sea Film Festival in 2016, practically the first thing he asked me was to do a gingerbread man animation for him. I said no for the reasons set out in the paragraph above, but in 2023 he finally got me to bring the gingerbread man out of retirement. Which I imagine he’s feeling smug about.
Cy Henty: I feel really smug about the fact I finally got Molly to animate a Gingerbread man segment for me. I have another dark Gingerbread monologue that I’m looking for a way to blackmail her into making in the future.
Q. Did you make any changes from the original script during filming?
Cy Henty: This song remains as it was originally performed. The version used recorded by Lobby was so good that it was the only one that remained in its original form. The surrounding narrative was constantly evolving to make its completion viable!
Molly Brown: I didn’t change the script but not long after The Grunting of the Watford Wyrm was finally completed I saw a call for submissions for something called The Fungi Film Festival, which wanted films about mushrooms and other fungi.
I knew Fungi Forage would be perfect for them, so I asked Cy if it would be okay for me to slightly re-edit the video to make it into a standalone film so I could submit it to this festival. He said that was fine, and Fungi Forage was not only accepted by the festival but ended up having an extra couple of North American screenings with them.
Q. What were some of your favourite moments during filming?
Cy Henty: The creation of this was a long struggle but kept myself and quite a few other artists busy over lockdown. What was wonderful was to bring together a group of animators, musicians and performers from around the world – from the extremely talented Paul Battin in the Channel Islands to musician and animator Kevin Pinel in Portugal to Croydon and Cornwall! In order to create the wider film. My favourite moment was actually watching back what Molly had done with this section!
Molly Brown: My favourite elements are the combination of Lobby Lud’s music and vocals with Cy’s lyrics. I also enjoyed throwing in a little nod to the 1965 video for Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (which is the one where he holds up the cards with excerpts from the lyrics).
Q. Did you experience any issues during filming?
Cy Henty: Yes – as I mentioned two other animators had pulled out and the entire cast and all the artists were in lockdown for the majority of the film. I struggled to pull all the individual pieces together – but thank my lucky stars that Molly stepped in to help me complete it!
Q. What makes Fungi Forage stand out as something different?
Cy Henty: I believe the Fungi Forage is a very unique short, emerging as it did out of Lockdown and set as it is in a surreal imaginary world. It brings together the Bonzo-dog musical style of Lobby Lud and the incredibly original animated style of Molly Brown.
Q. What do you hope people take away after watching the film?
Cy Henty: To be careful when picking mushrooms to eat! Hopefully a lot of fun and laughter!
Molly Brown: What Cy said. (Though I have no intention of going foraging for mushrooms, if I did I would print out the lyrics and take them with me.)
Q. Do you have any other projects which you are currently working on?
Cy Henty: I have recently been performing solo-character stand-up at the Museum of Comedy but am working on an audio comedy series of Dante’s Commedia with my comedy partner of 20 years Al Ronald. I have written a comic Rock Opera set inside a washing machine which Lobby is currently working on the instrumentation for. I hope to continue working with Molly as I love her work and am always excited if she comes to me with a new script to either voice over or perform in.
Molly Brown: At the time I’m typing this I am currently working on a film called ZILCH, which features a number of Horror-on-Sea regulars (including the likes of Cy Henty and one Philip Rogers). Fingers crossed, I’m hoping it will be a lot of fun.
You can watch Fungi Forage at the Southend Film Festival on Sunday 7th June at 12:30hrs as part of the MOSTLY MADE IN SOUTHENDPART ONE.
You can find out more about the festival and purchase tickets here.
Published in various websites, Philip is a reviewer who is best known for his interviews and media coverage of independent projects including; films, books, theatre and live events. Always on the lookout for something different to cover!