Tanner D. Masseth
Filmmaker, VFX Artist, 3D Animator
TannerD.Masseth@gmail.com
@tanner_masseth
Tanner D. Masseth is a Fargo, ND native with over a decade of experience working in Chicago's vibrant film production industry.
He took on a variety of technical and managerial roles for big and small budget productions, including alongside industry greats Spike Lee, Karyn Kusama, Michael Bay, and Jordan Peele. Inspired while working in tandem with VFX maverick James McQuaide on Candyman in 2020, Masseth left the industry to pursue an education in alternative methods for indie production. His practice emphasizes the experimental application of combining virtual environments, 3D models, and character animation with live-action footage.
Masseth has produced and directed a number of internationally screened short films, winning Best Avant Garde short for Portrait 001: Security Guard (2023) at Drunken Film Fest Oakland and the Chicago Award for Sing Our Song When the World Ends (2024) at Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Tanner has co-produced and co-directed two omnibus feature films — Coin Celleil (2023), a remake of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil involving more than 40 contributors, premiered at Sara's Gallery in New York City in September 2023. Man with a Movie Camera (2025), a cut-for-cut 3-panel remake of Vertov’s 1929 film premiered as the opening night film at the 35th Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
He is on the board of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and resides in Logan Square.
CV
Selected Works
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Lodgers of Euclid (in development)
upcoming 3D-animated feature film
Lodgers of Euclid is a feature animated film about an occult motorcycle club taking
contracts from an unnamed government agency, performing macabre rituals
across an industrial port city. The film responds to constructed
spectacles of domestic terrorism and accelerated symptoms of conspiracy
thought.
Initially conceived
as a short film, the film is being expanded into a feature length production and is currently seeking further funding.
Lodgers of Euclid
employs a variety of virtual production and compositing techniques, blending both live-action and virtual environments with 3D-modeled characters. The performances are captured using full body and facial motion capture, which than gets polished using iClone’s animation tools, before being ported into Unreal Engine for lighting, cinematics, and rendering.
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Man with a Movie Camera (2025)
collectively authored feature-length film
Nearly 100 years after Dziga Vertov produced his masterpiece of silent cinema, an international collection of filmmakers seeks to update montage theory as it applies to the pseudo-cinematic experience of scouring the web or scrolling on a smartphone.
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Sing Our Song When the World Ends (2024)
3D-animated short narrative film
A young girl is chased out of a nightclub by an evil force. She escapes between game worlds, idly witnessing a surreal chain of events beyond her control. Sing Our Song When the World Ends is a surreal depiction of the burden of knowledge and the ways in which information festers and disrupts the joys of daily life. It is about the maze of secrets that exist in parallel to the visible world and how these two realities permeate and invade one another at the expense of one’s peace of mind.
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Portrait 001: Security Guard (2023)
3D-animated short narrative film
Portrait 001: Security Guard is the first in a series of short films probing the existential woes that arise when one attempts to dissect their own social and physical alienation but lack the ability to reach satisfying conclusions. The portrait offers an empathetic glimpse into the raw anguish of contemporary American life and seeks to understand how and why violent fantasies act as countermeasures.
Watch on NoBudge
Coin Celleil (2023)
collectively authored feature-length film
Coin Celleil is an omnibus remake of Chris Marker’s 1983 essay film, Sans Soleil. A collective of over fourty amateur video artists, internet artists, and non-artists were organized from across the globe to create an idiosyncratic hodge podge of styles, symbols, memetic phenomenon, and online visual language.
Full Movie
Surveillance Film (2023)
short experimental essay film
A computer screen movie that recounts the author’s time spent scouring the internet for accessible webcams. The hobby grew into an obsession over the course of years, after he began visiting and recording public and private surveillance video from around the globe. A chance encounter puts him in close proximity to a controllable webcam, prompting him to reconsider his practice. Using public surveillance tools, he tracks down the exact location of the camera and sets a plan in motion to confront it once and for all.
Full Movie