Exploring the Technical Filmmaking and VFX Techniques Behind This Insane SXSW Short

While we all love SXSW for a plethora of reasons that range from the diverse films to the hungover breakfast tacos sought out after a night of premiere parties, industry mixers, and indie shows, the best feeling part by far might simply be stumbling upon a pure, new, raw-voiced film project which feels wholly unique and like something you didn’t ever conceive of existing ever before.

SXSW 2026 has lots of great films which might fit this bill, but one we’d like to highlight is the odd, midnight short film Mantis Stream! Like & Subscribe, which is about as off-the-rails as they come.

Created by filmmakers Sarah Maerten and Lincoln Robisch, who work under the shared title of “Clusterf*ck!”, the duo pulled off an impressive and very insane, “oner” style comedic short film that has a little bit of everything you never thought you wanted to see.

Here’s our convo with the duo about how they pulled the SXSW Vimeo Staff Pick Award-winning project together.

MANTIS STREAM! LIKE & SUBSCRIBE

NFS: Tell us a bit about CLUSTERF*CK! and how y'all came to work in filmmaking?

Sarah Maerten : Lincoln and I went to high school together in the middle of a cornfield in Western Maryland, but Clusterfck! came together during Covid. I was living in Chicago, and Lincoln was in Baltimore. We were both just out of college, him for filmmaking, me for acting. We had worked on many projects while Lincoln was in school, but he came to me with an idea he wanted to co-write and direct, which eventually became our last short, “The Divine and Tenacious Passion of an Industrious Filmmaker in the 21st Century”. After production wrapped on “Passion", I got the filmmaking bug, and I came to live in Baltimore so we could make more films as a writing/directing duo, and Clusterfck! was born.

As Clusterf*ck!, we have mainly focused on telling bizarre, overstimulating stories about late-stage capitalism, the absurdity of our modern digital age, and its effects on the human condition. So far, this has mainly been through our two short films, but we’ve got a lot of other odds and ends starting to take shape out of the ether. We have ideas for features, series, alternative reality games, sketches, and art installations. The last few years have been stockpiling a bunch of ideas, and I’m hoping the next few years will be making a bunch of them.

NFS: When did the idea for Mantis Stream! Like & Subscribe come to y'all? How did the concept develop into the film?

SM : We initially wanted Mantis Stream! Like and Subscribe to be something short, simple, and easy to film before focusing our energy on an eventual feature idea. That concept quickly got out of hand as we got carried away with more and more ideas that became something much more complicated and exciting.

Our original title was “Lovesong for my Girlfriend”, and the idea was centered around the same premise you see in the film...guy chokes to death on a livestream, and nobody helps, but the circumstances changed a lot over the course of working on the film. I think it was a beautiful moment when we decided that the livestreamer would be some kind of Mantis freak. I think, in general, we wanted to tell a story about what it feels like to be online right now, and how terrifying it can be to live in a world where people are too busy performing their emotions for a distant audience to exist in a genuine reality.

NFS: What camera did y'all shoot on? Why did you choose it?

Lincoln Robisch : We shot on a Sony FX6, but truthfully, I don’t think we ever put a ton of stake in what camera we were going to use. We had a friend who owned one and was kind enough to let us use it, and that was sort of the end-all, be-all in deciding what to shoot on. We were a scrappy production. We raised $5000 through Seed-and-Spark, and that was the entirety of our budget because Sarah and I were still buried in credit card debt from our last short. Everyone worked as a favor. When it came to equipment, we worked with what we could.

NFS: The film is presented as an "oner", although it seems like a lot of clever filmmaking tricks may be used. Can you tell us a bit about how you pulled off the project?

LR : Our original concept for the film always involved it being a long take. Choreographing that kind of blocking and extensive background action is something Sarah and I have a lot of fun doing. Early on, we decided that our main visual theme would be this descent from a simple physical world to a chaotic digital one. We decided we wanted to shoot the long take digitally, but we would then take the beginning section and run it through a 35mm film-out process, then have that gradual transition back to the original digital file. Then we would start emphasizing its digital nature more with crazy digital zooms and scans that put the noise right in the audience's faces.

Wanting to push this idea further, we decided we would shoot plates of the characters in the film, rotoscope them out of their backgrounds, and place them onto the long take like pieces of a collage. The final thread of this descent-into-digital idea came pretty close to production when we realized we wanted to 3D scan our shooting location to create a fu**ed-up, funhouse version of the set in Blender, populated by the now-fully 2D rotoscoped layers of the characters in the film. Truly, every stage of developing the idea was a blast, and I am proud that these ideas all made it into the film.

NFS: Can you share a bit about the editing process, in particular, how you were able to employ some of the more trippy effects towards the end?

SM : The editing process was very unconventional. The first time we were shooting, we planned to use 3D Software to storyboard, but after some setbacks to our original filming schedule, we took some time to experiment with apps like Polyscanner and Scaniverse. We realized that photogrammetry and 3D animation tools gave us incredible control in a space that could feel as digitally strange as we wanted the final part of the film to be. When we went into principal photography, I knew I wanted the final parts of the film to happen entirely in Blender, but I only understood enough about the program to know what I wanted to do was possible. What is crazy is that the original scope of our plan had nothing to do with what actually made it to the screen.

In post, we put our Producer/Editor, Mark Neil, through the wringer, doing a lot of rotoscoping. A majority of what you see after the cops come in, guns ablazing, are layers that Mark painstakingly cut out. (He busted a graphics card doing it.) In the Blender world, I was like a kid in a candy store as I learned more and more about what I could do with the software. I remember when we came up with the idea to stack the rooms together to make our long hallway, and how exciting it was to do that physically impossible dolly zoom. At a certain point in the experimenting, I didn’t tell Lincoln what I was doing because I knew that after over a year of working on this final Blender section, he was getting anxious to finish the film. I think we both agree that the final product was worth the extra time.

NFS: Finally, for our audience of aspiring filmmakers, what advice would you share to help them on their own indie filmmaking journeys?

LR : I think filmmakers can really get caught up in needing money to have permission to make something. I feel grateful to be in Baltimore, where the DIY spirit is really championed. I think when you let the limits of your budget inspire your creativity, some really amazing things can happen. For instance, rather than feeling like we needed to craft a half-million-dollar fun-house set for the end of our short, we realized we could make something that works even better aesthetically by using completely free software. I see a lot of people who sort of shackle themselves creatively with what they can or can’t do with their budget, rather than thinking about every possible way they can really express an idea.

My other advice would be to be really fu**ing nice to everyone who offers you their time and creative vision, and to pay it forward by offering your own favors whenever you get the chance. We were incredibly lucky to have a great big team that was down to work for nothing but the fun of it. You can’t grow those kinds of people on trees.

Be sure to check out the rest of our SXSW 2026 coverage!