BabyBaby on Their Love of Film, Each Other and Crappy VFX

When I ask Josefin Malmén and David Strindberg, a writing and directing duo who go by the name BabyBaby, to tell me about their filmmaking style in three words, they initially struggle. “Has This Been Done Before?” No, not quite, that’s five. Let’s try again. Josefin gives it a go: “Awkward, heart, grain?” But there’s one that hits the nail on the head: “What. Is. This?”

That’s probably what many would say upon watching BabyBaby’s (BB) films and projects for the first time. Things go from editorial to absolutely unearthly very quickly. Oh, you like that colourful H&M ad with nice music? Now have a short film about a buff bodybuilder who slowly gets swallowed up by his own head. That one is called ‘FLEX’ and although it seems like it is intentionally deep, Josefin and David explain that whatever themes end up in their films, they are either purely accidental, or subconscious. 

“We rarely set out to explore a certain theme,” they both agree. “It always comes from within and suddenly you’ve accidentally ‘explored’ the fragility of the male psyche, or something like that. But if we were to analyse our work just a little, I suppose one recurring theme could be characters balancing on the edge of reality.”

In fact, ‘FLEX’ is one of BabyBaby’s favourite projects together. Although it wasn’t that pleasant to shoot, due to the lack of finance and only having the location for five hours, this was the film which helped the duo close some doors and opene others. “We knew we wanted to move in a different creative direction from that point onwards, so we decided to start over from scratch. We found a strong crew of three to help us, but apart from being writers and directors we also did the set design, styling, catering, producing, editing, VFX and also… kept the bodybuilder moist and shiny throughout the shoot.” After that, BabyBaby submitted the film to Sundance on the very last day of possible submissions, arguing whether it was worth spending the submission fee on something that they thought would never happen. Lo and behold, it happened - and they archived the rest of their reel.

While ‘FLEX’ and Sundance changed a lot for Josefin and David, we need to take it back to the beginning, to find out what makes BB’s style this cluster of emotion, visuals and weirdness. Josefin was very shy growing up, spending her time reading and writing short stories. She even won a competition in sixth grade, where voice actors would act out the winning script on local radio. “It was truly awful, both the acting and the writing,” she remembers. “But also, fantastic.” She used to practise her English at the age of five or six by writing Academy Award acceptance speeches - “not sure if that was an inkling for something, or just insanity”. Let’s call it an inkling.

Meanwhile, David was out there making films when he was eight, using his dad’s VHS camcorder. It was a horror called ‘The Monster with the Axe’ and while it’s still missing some crucial VFX scenes (like his dad’s severed head being presented on a tray of lettuce) it was a real achievement for eight-year-old David. After that was a long line of parkour videos (like, three a week) with his friends who called themselves ‘The Lords of Gravity’ and most of the films featured the ‘too often overlooked’ combo of trampolines and guns.

Later in life, when David and Josefin met at a bar, they became a different kind of duo before a professional one. “It’s always funny to see how long it takes for new people we work with to ask. It took one of our producers a year. We were prepping our first shoot abroad when she nervously called and asked if we wanted one or two hotel rooms,” says David. “We started out helping each other on creative projects and our work together just progressed from there onwards.”

And before you ask yourselves, the name doesn’t have too much meaning behind it. It wasn’t something the duo spent a lot (if any) time pondering over. They had just finished a music video, their first one as creative partners, and they just needed a name. “David and Josefin wasn’t super catchy,” they say. “Also, even if Josefin is pronounced just like ‘Hosephine’, a lot of people outside of Sweden tend to think I’m a Mexican man with a weird ending to the name José. And nothing wrong with that of course, but… slightly misleading.”

Their first creative project as BabyBaby was filming someone’s recording session, which is something they did a lot of. They had saved around £200, which back then could get you places, and had asked their friend who was about to release a new track if they could make a video for her. The pitch was simple: “We’ll pay for everything, fix everything, but you can’t have any input.” She ended up saying yes. The crew consisted of them two, a cinematographer, the cheapest camera they could get their hands on and a friend with a day off and a driver’s licence. “Good enough. We broke into a parking garage and a quarry. Then spent the whole summer editing and doing VFX.” And actually, the video did quite well - it got a Vimeo Staff Pick which attracted some attention, so BabyBaby made another one… and another one. 

David remembers their first project differently: “Actually… I think our very very first project together was technically when Josefin helped me with a video starring a friend of ours wearing only Walter White old-man-underpants, dancing like possessed, until his body started to dissolve. Josefin lit the smoke grenades and I filmed with a DSLR. Ah, reminiscing.”

You probably have noticed a pattern in the work here - David is the weirder one. When it comes to merging their aesthetics to create BabyBaby’s artistic vision, it is more a case of Josefin and David developing theirs independently and then putting them into one bucket. “David did some really weird films before,” says Josefin. “Great ones. But… really weird. Like forty minutes watching a bunch of people on a beach staring at the moon.” She herself did more fashion, so when BabyBaby came to be, she says it was ‘strange, with a fashion twist’. “Then it became a lot of like… people being sliced up in crappy 3D or worlds breaking apart in crappy 3D. Lot’s of crappy looking VFX generally.” 

That became a style that they loved - the glitchy, DIY looking VFX that was reminiscent of their first days together but also different from what’s out there. Now BB find themselves venturing out towards the awkward ‘comedy’ world and seeing how far they can push things. “A few years ago ‘pushing it’ meant cramming as many shots as possible into a music video, driving our then colorist to the brink of madness. Now pushing it is more about pushing the characters of the story.”

Before Sundance, BB did a lot of smallerjobs on the side, like stop-motion ads for biscuits. Josefin puts it in one word: “Shoot-it-yourself-and-edit-grade-make-graphics-sound-online-and-export-in-45-different-formats-on-a-2k-budget fashion films.” A couple of those had objectively more potential then the rest, so naturally, they tried to overdeliver: “Hi, here’s the 3x15s you wanted but we also made a 60s where we added some VFX you didn’t ask for, here you go, use as you please.” Some of those ended up on the reel too! After restarting their journey through ‘FLEX’, BB kind of totally started over, as mentioned before. In fact, they just finished a project with H&M where they blended their BabyBaby tone with a crisp, fresh H&M look. 

“It was really interesting seeing that you can keep your creative ‘voice’ while mixing it with something else,” they say. “For us, a lot comes with the editing, the pace, and staying a bit too long where you’re not supposed to. Mixing the awkward b-roll footage with the money shots.”

Currently, BabyBaby are embarking on a couple of long-form projects as well, but are yet to shoot and survive the feature film process. “But we love to write,” says Josefin. “We love to develop characters and we live for film, so it feels like a natural progression. That said, short-form is also great. Shorts, music videos, commercials. Making the music video ‘No Curves’ last year was a joy. You get into the bubble, work your ass off for a little while, then move on. Or keep on dwelling for years on some of the choices you made.” For David it’s all connected - long, short, all forms. “One of the long-form projects we have is actually loosely based on a music video idea from years ago where the logline was ‘hot alien descends into a stiff upper middle class family home and stirs things up’.” 

Overall, through all the weirdness, super tight budgets, scrappy VFX, ups and downs, BabyBaby love working together and love film. To them, even a small idea from one side can spark big inspiration in the other, which then turns into a full-blown treatment or perhaps an outline for a screenplay. However, with a second brain always comes a second opinion, so you need to be prepared, as part of a creative duo, that every one of your ideas will be challenged. “This can be very frustrating at times, especially when you think you’re being a fucking genius but apparently are not,” says David. “But it also helps in refining and improving you. While directing we stick together, it’s not like we have different responsibilities. That said, Josefin tends to perhaps be one step closer to the actors, and I one step closer to the camera.”

And for Josefin, having a creative partner is synonymous with being liberated - “There’s something so freeing about creating under a moniker. It’s like a creative playground.” While she does a lot of commercial work under her own name, which tends to focus more on lifestyle and evoking other kinds of emotions, under BabyBaby she is all about comedy and awkwardness.

In the creative playground, however, there is the inevitable level of argument as well. About that, David is clear: “You win some, you lose some. But José-fin wins the most.” Josefin, however, is under the impression that with each other they ‘have very few disagreements’. There is so much prep pre-shoot, that if anything, the biggest fight would be over the amount of grain. 

She continues, “I’ve learned so much from David. But mostly, I feel it’s a privilege to have access to his brain because it’s absolutely genius.” While the commercial world favours a certain type of person - the ‘loud and proud’, as Josefin calls them - she describes David as a nerdy introvert and a creative force. “It inspires me. I’m trying less and less to be ‘pleasant’ and instead save that energy for being creative. I’m still pretty pleasant though.” 

Pleasant, but also an ‘idea fountain’, as David adds. “Truly great and bonkers concepts just come pouring out of her, seemingly effortlessly. This, combined with being a doer, is a killer combo. Where others wait for things to happen, she makes them happen.” Looking back years ago when Josefin was shooting fashion, David shares how she transformed their 150 square feet studio into a photo studio five times a week, making him wait outside. “When she wanted to make videos, she had us eat canned food for weeks to afford the rental equipment for her first music video. I’m constantly learning from her and trying to emulate her doer mentality, but as a nerdy introvert (as she so lovingly put it), I’m at my best diving deep into an idea - writing, developing, and visualising. I could probably spend an entire lifetime perfecting a single idea if Josefin didn't keep coming up with new weird-ass projects and pushing us forward.”

This symbiosis is what BabyBaby runs on. Well, that, and being totally bonkers together. In fact, they are now looking into the future and preparing to shoot an ‘offbeat horror monster meta short film’ and are very eager to come back to London (after moving to Stockholm for the pandemic). There’s no doubt that there are deeper, funnier, weirder and more wonderful things to come out of where ‘FLEX’ found its beginning, and we’re here to see it. When asked what empowers them to be their best creative selves and directors, BabyBaby leave us with this: 

“When you feel creatively trusted it’s like you suddenly get endless energy. You don’t want to let anyone down. Sometimes, it feels like people don’t understand that trust is probably the most effective way to get someone to overdeliver, cancel all their plans for the upcoming months, pull all nighters, do whatever it takes.”