Interview with Filmmaker Mark McKinsey (VOWS)

VOWS was the winner of BEST FILM at the Under 5 Minute FEEDBACK Film Festival in April 2018 in Toronto.

Matthew Toffolo: What motivated you to make this film?

Mark McKinsey: Going into my final year at my alma mater, I knew I wanted to dive into the challenge of creating my own short animation. I didn’t know when I would get the opportunity again, since my school offers an incredible amount of technical resources that can be quite expensive without access, but are crucial to producing a 3D animated short. Additionally, representation has always been extremely important to me. Growing up, I knew I was gay from a very young age, but wasn’t really given the opportunity to understand exactly what that meant. The media that I was consuming was strictly romanticizing heterosexual relationships (especially in animation). With this film, I wanted to romanticize a different kind of relationship…