SCAD Alumni Spotlight: Sitting down with award-winning filmmaker Mikael Trench

Last week I got the chance to interview filmmaker, entertainment journalist, and SCAD alumni Mikael Trench. We talked about everything — from his stop-motion animation company TriClops Films, his love for King Kong, and his time at The Connector as an arts and entertainment editor.

What do you remember about your time at The Connector as an arts and
entertainment editor?

“So, when I came to SCAD, and I found out about it and I really wanted to get involved. At that time, the arts and entertainment editor was about to graduate, or she was in her senior year. So, I contributed once, and then she said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be part of this thing.’ I ended up shadowing her for like a quarter. Then, I became an arts and entertainment editor. I think it was the spring quarter of my freshman year. All four years I was at SCAD I was an arts and entertainment editor, and it was great. It’s just a really great work experience. Just getting in there and getting to see what it was really like to kind of be in a real functioning journalism place. You know, pitching the ideas yourself and bouncing ideas off other people. And doing that while you’re doing your classes is hugely beneficial. It was very freeing. It was very fun. Challenging for sure, just timewise, but great in terms of what it offered me.”

How did you get your start in entertainment journalism?

“I started with my time working with Vox and then The Connector. I mostly envisioned myself working in animation, but I did see this as a good skill to have. It became really helpful in the pandemic when we didn’t really know where things were going to go, or what stuff was going to look like for the entertainment industry. So, it was definitely good. I applied to a bunch of places and saw what was out there. Currently, I’m working for Static Media. The company owns a bunch of different sites that cover different topics, and they have a pretty big following. The website I work for is called Looper, and I’m one of the entertainment news writers. So, I cover a wide array of topics. Sometimes it’s more industry business stuff — like I broke the news in 2022 that Bob Iger came back as Disney’s CEO. More recently, I talked about how the Oscars added a casting director category even though people wanted a stunts category, and so on, which is really great.”

How do you approach your reviews for films?

I try not to overthink it too much. I loved it when I was writing for The Connector, especially because people would always tell me, “Oh, it’s so cool you’re not spoiling a movie.”.  But you know, I tried to just kind of approach it as personally as possible and just go with my gut. As someone who is a bit of a filmmaker myself, I’m a bit more in the know about cinematography choices, especially animation-wise. I love breaking that stuff down and giving those people props. It was a very cool time writing for The Connector because I think that was when Marvel was really in their golden age. So, getting to take the time to say stuff like, “Hey, y’all give props to the VFX people who did this stuff in Infinity War because almost 90% of what this movie is would not be possible without these talented people.” I love doing that because I think it’s so easy to hide those people in the background and yet they exist. And I try not to be too vitriolic. I just do my best to explain where I’m coming from and what I see but I also understand that people worked hard on this.

How did you get into stop-motion?

I’m a huge monster movie fan. So, anything like Godzilla related or whatever I’m a huge fan of, and I really loved the original King Kong. So, I became aware of that, and so I would go to Blockbuster every weekend and get any giant gorilla movie I could get my hands on. I came across the original one, which
of course was done using stop motion and they blended it with live action and stuff. And it just blew my mind because I’d never seen anything like that, and it just snowballed from there. I watched a lot of the Wallace and Gromit films and Robot Chicken too. I’d stay up till 2 AM and watch Adult Swim and it just
gave me nightmares, but I couldn’t stop watching it. Then I had a friend in middle school who showed me how to make little animations using apps on your phone and I kind of just made little crappy animations with playdough and my action figures and stuff for a little while. I just kind of kept making movies
and I’ve been making them ever since.

What are some works that inspired your filmmaking?

Other than the ones I’ve said, there’s another stop motion animator called Ray Harryhausen, and he was inspired by King Kong when it originally came out and ended up becoming an animator himself. He worked on all these influential sci-fi fantasy movies like Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. I also rented those as a kid. Sometimes I feel like my soul is really like a 70s-era dad, I watch all these old B movies. But that’s just kind of my comfort food, really. But I just latched on to that kind of stuff. I really leaned into stop motion because it felt a little more liberating. I love that. I’ve grown to love the community in stop motion because it is a bit more niche. So, it’s not quite as pressuring as some of the other animation mediums out there. Stop-motion isn’t just a novelty, but I think it has real power because of the tangibility of everything and I think people respond to that one way or another. So, I hope that I can help in any little way to keep that kind of magic alive if that makes sense.

How did you form Tri-Clops Studios?

Yeah, I officially started the brand in 2022. I had my YouTube channel for a while, which went through a bunch of different names. It was originally called Cyclops Studios. It was very inspired by monster movies and things like that in terms of giving it that kind of character.  I wanted to start a studio ever since I got into animation. I wanted to, even while I was still building my way up, have this brand here and let that kind of develop with me, my sensibilities, and my taste. So launched it and have just been building it and figuring out where I want to go with it. It’s still always ever evolving but it’s been really fun.

If you’re interested in some of Mikael Trench’s written articles you can read them here: https://www.looper.com/author/mikaeltrench