How A TC Company Went From TV Commercials To Movie Magic

JohnPaul Morris always knew he wanted to make movies in northern Michigan. His company becoming a special effects house, though? Well, that came as a bit of a surprise.

Morris is the owner of Practical Films, a Traverse City-based film production studio he started in 2009. Back then, Practical’s bread and butter was commercial production, and the studio has made TV spots over the years for everyone from Traverse City Tourism to Short’s Brewing Company to the city of Muncie, Indiana. In 2015, though, Morris and his team started working more on narrative projects, culminating in 2019 with the production of Practical’s first feature-length film, Quicksand.

Quicksand, which garnered acclaim on the film festival circuit before officially releasing in 2023, ended up mapping out a new direction for Practical. While Morris says the studio is still doing commercial work, Quicksand unexpectedly gave Practical a foot in the door for another part of the film industry: visual effects.

“After we released Quicksand, we suddenly had a bunch of filmmakers asking us, ‘How did you make that?’” Morris tells The Ticker. Specifically, Practical was fielding questions about the film’s 400 visual effects shots. “We hadn’t set out to do anything more difficult than just making a movie. Figuring out how to do visual effects was just part of our approach that we figured was normal.”

As it turned out, it wasn't so normal for a film production studio to undertake hundreds of special effects shots in its debut feature – especially the types of sequences that feature in Quicksand.

“We crashed cars, made our characters sink neck-deep into quicksand, made guns fire and windows smash, and exploded a gas station,” Morris laughs. “Talking to other filmmakers, we realized how unusual those types of shots are in a low-budget independent movie. And so, now, we’re suddenly being recognized as VFX guys.”

The phone, in other words, has been ringing. Recently, Morris served as a producer and visual effects supervisor for a Michigan-made coming-of-age movie called An Autumn Summer, starring Lukita Maxwell (a young actress known for playing Alice in the Apple TV series Shrinking) and Mark McKenna (whose credits include films like Sing Street and TV shows like One of Us Is Lying). The film’s logline – “In a magical lake town, one couple and four best friends spend the final month before college chasing an endless summer” – doesn’t necessarily bring to mind special effects splendor. But Morris says viewers might be surprised to learn how much visual effects work goes into rendering even the simplest concepts for the screen.

“Some of the effects in that film are as simple as adding the things that cameras just don't capture well, like rain and fireflies,” he explains. “But some are as complicated as a shot of two lovers ascending into the night sky and finding themselves surrounded by the Northern Lights. And making people fly convincingly, that’s a tough thing to do.”

Other clients have called upon Morris and his team to simulate a house fire, recreate a 1920s terrorist bombing, resurrect Boston circa the American Revolution, bring a tyrannosaurus rex back to life, and crash a British naval ship ashore during a winter storm. The projects aren’t big-deal Hollywood productions – at least not yet – but Morris says they’ve been good opportunities for Practical to hone its skills and try out different things.

Rather than leaning on technologies like artificial intelligence or CGI (computer-generated imaging), Morris’s preference is to keep effects shots as tactile and grounded in the real world as possible. In Quicksand, for instance, the aforementioned action sequences featuring car crashes and exploding gas stations were done using hyper-realistic miniature models. The same is true for many of the projects the studio has been hired to execute since.

In the case of rendering the British Naval fleet, for instance – for a documentary about the Revolutionary War – Practical used meticulously-built miniature boats to wind back the clock to the 18th century. Lake Michigan stood in for the Atlantic Ocean for most of the shots, though the scene where a boat runs aground demanded some extra attention.

“That shot was incredibly challenging to do,” Morris says of the boat’s crash. “We set up a huge pool and lit it specifically for this shot, and then we covered the surface of the water with soy wax, which hardens like ice but then allows this big ship to come crashing through and actually crack it. We couldn't put real ice in the water because it would melt too fast for us to get the shot.”

Beyond paying the bills, Morris says branching out into visual effects work could be the thing that helps transform his most ambitious vision from dream into reality.

“I’ve always had the dream of making this big, epic sci-fi movie in northern Michigan with no CGI, which is insanely ambitious and is going to create a lot of puzzles for some of the scenes I already know are in the script. But that’s kind of what makes it fun,” Morris says. The project, which Morris calls Future Kings, has been in the works since 2015, with Practical premiering a 15-minute concept short film version in 2018.

“That project is so large that it’s definitely on its own timeline,” Morris continues. “I can’t force it to happen in the next couple years. But I’m really excited about the position the script is in at this point. We'll be able to start taking steps for pitching, casting, and financing soon, hopefully this year. And having the opportunity to do all this special effects work with outside clients? That’s absolutely going to make a difference as we move forward."

Photo credit: Broderick Steele