What is Bad Influence?
Director's Note by Vincent Sekafetz
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Bad Influence is a story about assumptions, identity, forgiveness, freedom, and a whole bunch of little trains.
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In 2016, I was filming a series about a bunch of little trains in my spare time, and by 2017 had developed plans for a second season. This series was rudimentary, the sets crude or non-existent, the dialogue improvised on the spot based on how I wanted the episode to go, and was inspired by the likes of the Thomas Creator Collective for story inspiration. While this series was a good start for my train video career, I quickly grew into more complex forms of filmmaking after being introduced to the wider adult Thomas the Tank Engine modeling fandom, many of whom created detailed miniatures for their sets instead of my haphazard location filming and wrote detailed and sometimes profound scripts long before shooting. For a while, I still planned to execute my outlandish second season using many of these more advanced skills, but after a year I had completely moved past it.
Yet some of the ideas weren't too bad.
In early 2018, I re-examined several of my scrapped second season plans and fashioned them into an odd conglomerate completely independent of my old series, what I figured would be a half-hour to 40 minute special to release around Thanksgiving with my new filmmaking skills. This would become Bad Influence.
I filmed a lot of location stock footage for it during my vacations in the summer, some of which remains in the movie, but by the time fall rolled around, I still had no script nor plan of how to finish it within the next 2 months. I turned to my friend Matt Michaud (Enterprising Engines) for advice on how to turn this idea into a story, and from there we hashed out a treatment over several Skype calls. It was only then that I begun writing the first draft of "Bad Influence". Funnily enough, the name was there from the beginning. It just stuck. Only years later did I truly appreciate what it actually meant.
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Needless to say the "special" didn't come out in time for Thanksgiving, nor in time for six Thanksgivings following it.
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But what followed was 5(?!) years of blood, sweat, tears, music, spray paint fumes, clay, and draw masks. Soooo many draw masks.
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In 2019 I became close with two people who without Bad Influence wouldn't have been executed, Annie C and Alex Townsend. These two knew more about the Thomas universe than I did, but the support and insight they offered was far more valuable than any "deep train lore". Through both their advice and the experiences I shared with them, I was able to shape Bad Influence from a loose but ambitious sequence of events into a work of heart far greater than the sum of its parts. I soon discovered that I was making a movie that reflected my own life, one that treated itself as a film first and a Thomas Film second. That is of course not to discredit the incredibly valuable help I received from Eric-Pierre Drouin and Sam Webster early on, whose knowledge of both railways and characters helped develop the movie in ways that are intrinsically woven into the final story. However, I had realized that my project was long past "Railway Series Lore" and "TCC Aesthetics". What I was telling needed to be told, and not just to Thomas the Tank fans.
On June 19th, 2019, I finished the first full draft of the screenplay, and by March 2021, I had already done two read-through rewrites of it, some edits of which completely changed and enhanced character arcs, symbology, thematic consistency. Between that time I filmed for the movie whenever I could, making the choice to use super station track for standard gauge and digitally scaling down the narrow gauge engines in post to further differentiate between the two railways that served as the centerpiece for the film. I combined both the lighting benefits of filming outside with the creative freedom of building detailed miniature sets to convey the majority of the daytime scenes within the movie, and reshot several sets many times in order to achieve the visuals I was looking for. One of these cases was for Crovan's Gate, the location most frequently seen. After filming 90% of what was needed on it in July 2019, it was completely rebuilt in two separate sets two years later, with close to zero overlap with the previous props used. Alex personally designed and constructed a dozen new building props accurate to the original set seen in Season 4 of Thomas & Friends, and the new set was filmed over two months half a year apart, adding up to a total of 4 times that it has been reconstructed for the film. (The actual station itself wasn't filmed until July 2024- yikes!)
In mid-2020, I started to play around with the concept of digital faces, inspired by the facial assembly line used in The Magic Railroad Parody, another train movie I had been part of the crew of. In the parody, the team took photographs of physically constructed facial molds to convey the engines' expressions. I figured "why not do that without ever having to leave the editing room?" The result has become something very unique to the identity of Bad Influence (executed by a talented crew of Trainz filmmakers over the first half of 2024) but also the biggest thorn in its side, derailing post-production even more by months. I can only hope that in the end it was worth it to you.
"Season 12 but good" has its positives and negatives.
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Who is the Bad Influence?
Well, you have to watch the movie to find out!
In all seriousness, the term "Bad Influence" manifests itself in a great number of characters. Part of the fun of making this movie is wondering how the audience will react and who or what they will decide the Bad Influence is. "Bad Influence" means a great deal of things, just as Bad Influence: The Movie is a lot of different things. It's both an in-depth send up to the beautiful complexity of the Rev W. Awdry's children's books and a sharp critique of them. It's both autobiographical and a wishful commentary on others I have observed during my life while I was writing it. And yes, surprisingly, James is as big a part of it as Ivo is. Maybe even bigger. In fact, Bad Influence has gone through a lot of identity crises, and I've gone through a lot of self-doubts while making it. But in the end I've been able to re-examine and reclaim a lot of what makes me me through it.
I hope that you can find yourself in it too.
At its core it's really just two things: a film, and a train video.
That's really all it is.
- Vincent Sekafetz
writer and director
