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Animation fest: Former Renegade receiver to screen Hair Love in Ottawa

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It took 14 years to bring Matthew A. Cherry back to Ottawa.

Make that 14 years, 4,981 backers for a $284,058 US Kickstarter campaign and much sweating over details for the animated short, Hair Love, that will be screened and featured in an Ottawa International Animation Festival “professional development” session at the National Arts Centre on Sept. 28, Day 4 of the five-day festival.

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“We always knew that Ottawa was a really big festival that was going to time up with our release,” Cherry, a former player with the Ottawa Renegades, said in a telephone interview from Culver City, Calif. “Sony (Pictures Animation) has been really great in getting us in front of the best festivals in the world, and this was one of them that was on our radar. I believe they reached out and we screened it for them and they were into it, so we ended up getting in.”

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Production wrapped up just before its August theatrical release as an introductory presentation to the feature-length Angry Birds 2.

Matthew Cherry attends The Angry Birds Movie 2 and Hair Love on Aug. 12 in Culver City, Calif.
Matthew Cherry attends The Angry Birds Movie 2 and Hair Love on Aug. 12 in Culver City, Calif. Photo by Andrew Toth /Getty Images for Columbia Pictur

Online videos of black men styling young girls’ hair inspired Hair Love. Animation takes money, though, which led to the Kickstarter campaign.

Fortunately for those associated with the project, Cherry’s desire to “normalize” depictions of people of colour in animation struck a chord: The final total nearly quadrupled the original goal of $75,000.

“The Kickstarter campaign was crazy,” Cherry said. “I’m really active on social media (more than 140,000 Twitter followers), so (the funding involved) some people I was familiar with on social, and some people I knew in real life. It was just kind of a combination of people coming to the project organically and others through a direct reach-out. Definitely it was kind of a once in a lifetime thing where everybody just really got behind it.”

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Cherry’s message to attendees for the Sept. 28 session — coincidentally, it starts an hour after the Ottawa Redblacks, the city’s current CFL representatives, kick off against the Edmonton Eskimos at TD Place stadium — will focus on “the process.

“I think a lot of times, specifically with animation, there’s a little bit of mystery to the process. We just want to break it down in a way that’s relatable and understandable and hopefully inspire people to get out there and make their own projects, too.”

Matt Cherry as a receiver during practice with the CFL’s Ottawa Renegades in September 2005.
Matt Cherry as a receiver during practice with the CFL’s Ottawa Renegades in September 2005. Photo by Errol McGihon /Postmedia

His only previous visit to Canada’s capital lasted just 12 days in September 2005, when the then 23-year-old receiver was signed by the Ottawa Renegades. He left, he said in an interview two years ago, because of the extreme disorganization of the franchise, which the Canadian Football League would ultimately suspend after that season.

Following subsequent Arena League and NFL Europe stints, he signed with the NHL’s Baltimore Ravens and injured a shoulder during training camp before retiring as an athlete and moving to Los Angeles, eventually becoming an independent director of music videos and live-action productions.

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For name-droppers, Cherry shares Hair Love’s IMDb directing credit with Everett Downing Jr. (Up, WALL-E, Brave) and Bruce Smith (The Proud Family, The Princess and the Frog). Sacramento Kings player Harrison Barnes is co-executive producer, former CFL and NFL player Andrew Hawkins is an executive producer and former NBA player Dwyane Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union are associate producers.

Closing credits display Kickstarter contributors over a handful of pages. “I think it’s a really big part of our story,” Cherry added, “kind of an everyman and underdog element of it all.”

Cherry also turned Hair Love into a New York Times-bestseller children’s book. Illustrated by Vashti Harrison, it has a different ending and a different voice: While the animated short features a woman as narrator, the book uses Zuri, the girl whose hair her father, Stephen, must style.

“The short and the book were two totally different target audiences. With children’s picture books and ours specifically, the age range for those are kids that are three to five years old. We wanted to make sure that it was very fleshed out in a way that would resonate with kids. Also, just the nature of the story, we wanted it to really specifically speak to young girls of colour who have natural hair, and putting it in Zuri’s voice helped us out like that,” Cherry said.

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ALSO: Hair Love fits with ‘game-changer’ theme for OIAF director of programming

“Then in the short, the only voice that’s in the short is that of the mom. For us, the ending in the short is different than it is in the book, and it was important for us to kind of make that connection with the mother because she’s a hair vlogger and it was kind of hard to do an entire short with no dialogue when one of the most important elements is basically a woman telling you how to do hair. We were always trying to wrack our brains in how we could kind of do this in pantomime. For us, it just made sense to have that be the only voice that was in the short because it kind of helps you connect that the mom was kind of hiding in plain sight all along as a hair vlogger.”

The cover of Hair Love, the book version of an animated short movie written and directed by former pro football player Matthew A. Cherry.
The cover of Hair Love, the book version of an animated short movie written and directed by former pro football player Matthew A. Cherry.

Cherry said he had heard tales of major animated movie productions requiring between three and five years.

“I can’t say that I knew all the nuances and the details why it took so long, but definitely that part of the process really was probably the most eye-opening: just how detailed you have to be with every single thing,” he said. “What colour is the carpet? What style is the dresser? What type of watch is he wearing? Every single thing, you need a picture reference for it and to be very specific with it, unlike live action, where oftentimes, especially indie, you’re just kind of rushing and figuring it out and kind of using what you have. That was definitely a different part of the process.

“But, also, the thing I learned the most was just how similar it is to live-action. You want to be very specific with the emotions that the characters are providing and giving off, and you also want to make sure that, at the end of the day, it’s like human storytelling and you want to make sure that you’re hitting all those beats like you would in live-action.”

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