When Mindie Lind was a teenager, she was invited to New York City to sing on the Maury Povich Show, long before the talk show became known for paternity guessing games as she is quick to note in “View From the Floor.” In more innocent times, she was to perform Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” and while she and her mother knew that the invite wasn’t entirely because of her voice, she had to be disappointed that it had more to do with the fact that she was born without legs, encouraged by a producer on the show to crawl out in front of the live studio audience in spite of the fact that she rarely did so even at home.
Lind may have conquered the stage even back then, invited back to “Maury” when she proved to be a popular guest, but there’s something about commanding it on her own terms in the wonderfully entertaining six-minute animated short that’s premiering at Sundance this week. Partnering with “Year of the Fox” director Megan Griffiths, Lind adds filmmaking to the list of talents that she has when besides singing, she knew no bounds as a kid who joined the marching band and did ballet, though whatever joy she received from those activities was gradually eroded by the constant presence of news crews that wanted to make a special interest segment out of it.
At the top of “View From the Floor,” Lind makes known her disdain for “inspiration porn,” which she describes as reducing those living with disability down to “our main characterization [being] that we’re inspirational to others,” but nonetheless it’s difficult not to have your spirits lifted by the delightful personal story she shares with such wry humor and exuberance, one of “a great many exploitation pickles” that she cites in the short by imagining herself being brined in a jar — and promises will be explored in a full-length feature that she and Griffiths have spent the better part of a decade developing. Offering viewers a taste of what’s to come, the short is set to be a standout in the Documentary Shorts Program and it was our good fortune to catch up with Lind and Griffiths before making their way to Park City to talk about how they came to collaborate with one another, thanks to the late, great Lynn Shelton, the freedom found in animation and how one of the best days in Lind’s life somehow got even a little bit better with a Sundance acceptance call.
How did you join forces on this?
Megan Griffiths: We were introduced almost 10 years ago by Lynn Shelton, who met Mindie through the music community in Seattle, and when Mindie was talking to Lynn about wanting to do a project around her life story and disability, Lynn said, “You should talk to Megan Griffiths.” We went out and got coffee and just really hit it off right away and I thought that it was a project that I just desperately wanted to be part of. We then spent 10 years trying to make it in various ways until the last year-and-a-half when we focused on going the animated documentary route.
Mindie Lind: There’s also something that my story can do with a universal experience, which is actually something that Lynn told me, which is something that’s taken us this whole time to really figure out how to say the truth about the matter in a way that’s meaningful and how we experience it. It was always pitched from the beginning, like “I need to tell my story,” and Megan would be a great collaborator for that, and Megan would never tell my story [on her own], but she and I are really good at doing it together, which I love.
Since you’ve made no secret of the fact that there’s a larger feature in the works, was it hard to hone in on a specific incident for this – your appearance on “Maury”?
Mindie Lind: This just seemed like such a good section because a lot of the movie is about exploitation as a performer with disability, and this was such a good breadth of that conversation in that it’s nuanced and available for wide audiences, which is really cool.
Megan Griffiths: Yeah, when we were having people give us feedback on the feature, the Maury Povich [section] was just a very popular part. Everyone remembers those shows, especially in that era and having Mindy’s experience specifically, it’s like a whole different point of view on something that I think we were all really familiar with.
How did animation become the best way to tell this story?
Mindie Lind: It’s been so fun to do animation because you can do anything, and it let us get super creative. A lot of it came to life in animation, like the George Clooney bit is amazing for that reason, but also we wanted to be able to authentically tell a story of me looking back on my life. So I’m 40, and I’ve had all of these different versions of myself that we thought that’s such a good way to show that. It gave us a freedom that we were struggling to figure out for live action.
Megan Griffiths: It also lets you go into the magical realism and the more surreal elements of depicting an emotional experience as opposed to a literal experience all the time. The feeling of having all eyes on you is something that we were really able to get at, having people whose whole head is an eye and media people whose whole head is a microphone or a camera. It just gives a visual dimension to this that you can feel in the pit of your stomach, but it’s hard to do that in a narrative live-action format.
What was it like to find the right animator and style for this?
Mindie Lind: We didn’t actually have to search hard, thank goodness. Joe Garber was a mutual friends of ours and he was just really great and down with the vibe and could take what we were thinking, like the eyeballs and make them neat and expressive. He’s just been a gem to work with.
Megan Griffiths: Yeah, we scored with Joe. He just gets what we’re trying to do with this. And we had to figure out what the character [of Mindie] looks like, and the color palette of the world, and all of that always comes back to how can we capture who Mindie is and what’s Mindie’s vibe? Because it should reflect what she loves in the world, so the vibrant colors are all Mindie.
Mindie Lind: We went for a pop art aesthetic for sure. And [Joe] got what we were talking about. He’s got a cartoon background and proclivity and there’s a strong color palette, just in the background. A lot of those scenes could stand alone as their own cards, which is really neat.
Mindie, when this really comes alive with both your voice and the music you create for the score, what was it like to work on the sonic aspect of this?
Mindie Lind: The title “View from the Floor” came from a song that I wrote by the same title and that is also the score for this piece and it really is all about my experience of having no legs. Like my view from the floor is not what it seems and clearly, that’s what we would do for this. It was so fun to create a score that wasn’t just the song to be good for this piece and I can’t wait to keep going and do that with the feature. It feels like such an exciting, surreal part that I get to be doing all of that.
There’s also a really fun part with Foley that we got to do in post-production that really brought this alive. Our Foley artist Jamie Hunsdale is a homie of ours and he’s just a ball of laughs to work with. When I’m going in the pickle jar [in the film], we could have had a real sound there, but we wanted to hear some “bloop, bloop, bloop” — stuff that’s going to be funny.
Megan Griffiths: Yeah, there’s a lot of sound effects that are Jamie’s, and they’re just emitted from him — the bloops and a couple of the other things throughout, you’ll probably spot them or hear them as you watch. But it adds a whole level of humor to it, and it also felt like it goes with the vibe.
Megan, was this a different experience for you, not only in terms of animation, but also doing documentary or is it all storytelling?
Megan Griffiths: Both documentary and animation are pretty new for me. I did a little bit of animation in “I’ll Show You Mine,” and I’ve done short documentary-style pieces. But this is definitely new territory, and working alongside Mindie is also new territory for me because we’re both directors on this project, so there are a lot of things that are new. But ultimately I always feel directing comes down to making decisions based on your gut to support the vision that you have in your mind. Mindie and I had nine years working together to solidify that vision and make sure that we both were on the same page. It all just then comes down to people having questions and you have a gut reaction and all those little questions over the course of a project guides it to its final form.
What was it like to get the call from Sundance?
Mindie Lind: [Megan] called me on my wedding day and told me. She’s like, “Mindie, you’re not going to want to answer your phone” because everybody had left. And then my husband was like, “Answer it.”
That’s insane. On your wedding day?
Mindie Lind: That was a high. That was a good 2024 high point. Affirmation just keeps being the word that I’m feeling in terms of the excitement around being in Sundance. We have high hopes for the feature, and we feel super confident in it and we’re in the phase of trying to animate and fund our full-length [version] right now, so this was originally a way for us to get to do that. But it’s turned into this wonderful thing that we get to share and it is really nice to have like a five-minute “This is our brain on ‘View from the Floor,’ vision for everybody to see.” We’ve gotten to watch it with people and see how it lands and it’s landing really well. We’ve involved the Crip community a lot and that’s gotten really positive feedback as well.
Megan Griffiths: Yeah, it stands really well on its own, and it is a part of a larger piece, but it does tell its own very meaningful little part of that story. And getting that call was a total shock and such a pleasant one because I haven’t been back to Sundance with a film of my own since “The Off Hours” in 2011, so it is super exciting to do that and I’m excited to watch it in a big room full of people. It’s our premiere, and I just feel proud whenever I watch this short and I want to share that with a big room. And I want to be next to Mindie when I’m doing it.
“View from the Floor” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the Documentary Shorts Program on January 25th at 11:30 am at the Library Center Theatre, January 26th at 1:10 pm at the Megaplex Redstone, January 28th at 3 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City, February 1st at 8:10 pm at the Megaplex Redstone. It will also be available online from January 30th through February 2nd via Sundance’s virtual platform.