8 years in the making, RIP (Recovery in Progress) is an experimental short film collection. To date, the shorts have screened at selected genre film festivals around the world and have picked up numerous awards. With the exception of Fried Barry, none of these have been released online as the intention was always to release them as an impactful collection.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE (Ryan Kruger) I had found myself at a point in my career, where I was frustrated with purely investing my time and energy in music videos alone. I had full creative control with each video’s narrative and how they were shot. However, I was still restricted by music genre and content. I felt that I couldn’t push the boundaries or my visual style. This was of course all before Fried Barry. These creative restrictions built up feelings of depression and deep frustration at the lack of artistic expression that I was confined to. So I decided, I would work towards completing a number of experimental films that allowed me to truly express myself and fulfill my creative needs. This led to a 8 year project that I am proud to present to the world and looking back I am grateful for the hard times, as this collection of short films was the creative seed that led to the birth of my feature film, Fried Barry.
EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING Personally, experimental filmmaking is a unique and powerful art form that allows us to be artists in the truest sense. The word “experimental” is all about trying something new and different…so different that, at first, it can cause confusion, or make the viewer feel uncomfortable. Some films revel in disorder or chaos, ideas colliding without enforced structure, others are milder and convey surreal imagery and/or visual metaphors. Many of these films are intended to be shocking and horrific, but all are open to a multitude of interpretations. Experimental filmmaking is a world of its own, and it’s one that is often overlooked by the majority of filmmakers these days.