If things had turned out differently 12 years ago, Mike Sutherland might be able to attach the memory of a face to the name Matt Cherry.

On the other hand, if things had been different, Chelsea Clinton might not have pledged financial support to an animation project led by independent director Matthew A. Cherry.

Same guy, different fates, based in part on a 12-day period in September 2005.

The struggling Ottawa Renegades brought in Cherry on Sept. 9 and worked him out as a wide receiver. A University of Akron product, he had, only a couple of weeks earlier, been released by the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League.

Cherry never played for the Renegades, though, and a news report on Sept. 21 said he had left the team “at the behest of his agent.”

Just like that, he was gone.

The Renegades weren’t around much longer, either. They finished the 2005 season with seven victories in 18 games, missed the playoffs, and the franchise collapsed before the start of the 2006 campaign.



Matthew A. Cherry, director of "The Last Fall" and "9 Rides." In the background is a Jacksonville Jaguars jersey from his time with that National Football League club in 2004..

“That was a big part of the reason why I didn’t stick around too long, because it just seemed like it was very unorganized,” Cherry told the Sun from California. “You could tell it was probably going to be their last season. There were rumours about it happening, and it didn’t seem like there was a commitment. There weren’t a lot of people at the games.

“It just seemed like, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t want to risk getting injured in a situation where this team may not even be around next year.’”

“Nobody would blame him for that,” said Sutherland, an offensive lineman who spent seven seasons with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Saskatchewan Roughriders and Montreal Alouettes before concluding his CFL career with a 2003-05 stint with the Renegades and now communications services manager for Ottawa Sports & Entertainment Group, which owns the current Ottawa franchise dubbed the Redblacks.

“It was disorganized. We were all kind of wondering how long it was going to go on,” Sutherland added about those Renegades. “When you feel that that (regimentation) is eroding, then you question the whole thing. It’s an instinctual feeling that it shouldn’t be this way. It can’t operate this way and be successful. When you’re around successful organizations, you see how they run their stuff and you see how tight it is and you see how it’s so thought out.”

Despite his short stay in the Renegades’ camp, Cherry said he enjoyed his time in Canada’s capital.

“I still follow the Ottawa CFL account,” he said. “I see they’re the Redblacks now, and it seems like they really have it turned around. It seems like the stadium is really nice and they still have a lot of support from the city.

“Now, I wish I was there when they were the Redblacks.”

Some Renegades players ended up with other CFL clubs through a dispersal draft conducted before the 2006 season. For his part, Cherry, who before Cincinnati had been on the practice squad of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, then tried out for an Arena Football League team in Los Angeles, then signed with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers and, after a brief stint in NFL Europe, took his final shot at pro football with the Baltimore Ravens. That didn’t work out, either, so he retired as a player and moved to Los Angeles in 2007.

He had a degree in radio and television broadcasting and media production from Akron, plus hands-on experience in production and promotions with the campus radio station and some Cleveland radio stations as an intern.

“I always knew I wanted to be in production,” Cherry said about his post-football career goals, “and I knew really early, when I made it to the league. I saw how political it was and I knew I had to really start thinking about my Plan B because I didn’t anticipate being there for long, especially coming to the game as an undrafted free agent.”

After Cherry got to L.A., a friend told him about the Streetlights program that provided training as a production assistant. Additional experience and networking led to work on commercials and music videos: More than 40 and 20, respectively, according to his biography.

His first credit was for directing a 2008 video for R&B artist Terry Dexter, followed by others for artists including Michelle Williams, Tweet, Jazmine Sullivan, Lalah Hathaway, Kindred the Family Soul, Snoop Dogg, The Foreign Exchange, Bilal, N’dambi, Maysa Leak, Dwele, Najee, K’Jon and Take 6.

He has also directed short films titled This Time and Forward and two feature-length productions. The first of them, released in 2012, focused on a subject he knew well, with The Last Fall telling the story of a journeyman pro football player who was back at home after his athletic career came to a forced end. In 2016, there was 9 Rides, about an Uber driver who received important personal news on New Year’s Eve.

Cherry also has a sizeable online fan base starting with more than 82,000 Twitter followers. That undoubtedly helps explain the success of a Kickstarter campaign to fund a five-minute animated production called Hair Love, about a black man caring for his daughter’s hair for the first time. A stated target of $75,000 was blown past early and the final total was $284,058 from 4,981 backers, including Clinton, the 37-year-old daughter of the 42nd U.S. president, Bill Clinton.

As Cherry puts it, animation is expensive and more money translates into more technological bells and whistles.

On top of that, film production isn’t football.

As a wide receiver, Cherry focused mostly on one-on-one battles with defensive backs. If he broke free from coverage, he had a chance to make the reception. Even if he did that, the ball still might not arrive if the quarterback didn’t read the developing play the same way Cherry had or if a lineman’s missed block meant the quarterback got sacked.

“To me, football is kind of like focusing on your job in the hope that everybody else does their job, too,” Cherry said.

“Being a film director, to me, is similar to being a head coach or an owner: You’re not just focused on your one task, you’re literally in charge of it all coming together. If it’s the hair and makeup person, why does the makeup look like that? If it’s the set designer, why does the set not work with the storyline? If it’s the actors …

“Being a director, you can’t just think of one thing. You’re thinking about the entire puzzle coming together and you’re trying to see that vision from ideal all the way to completion.”



Matthew A. Cherry says he wants to counter the barrage of negative stereotypes about black fathers that exists in media.

DIRECTOR MATTHEW A. CHERRY TELLS YOU WHY HE's MAKING HAIR LOVE

Matthew A. Cherry has directed music videos, commercials and a handful of live-action films, both shorts and feature projects. His first animation project is Hair Love, about a black man who helps care for his daughter’s hair for the first time.

The former professional football player, who has no daughter, explains why he decided to produce this film.

• The idea started with online videos of black men attending to young girls’ hair. “To me, those viral videos proved that there is a market for this because these videos are clearly doing numbers,” he said. “They always have a really positive feedback and they perform better than a lot of other videos that I’ve posted.”

• “In terms of really thinking that this was a good idea, it was really just from a lot of my friends who are young black fathers who have kids and not feeling like I have ever really seen that depicted in the animation world. It’s always the single moms. Dad is not there, Dad is abusive. Baby mommas instead of (the couples) being married. All these kinds of negative depictions of black fathers that you see in mainstream media. And so, for me, seeing all my friends who are black fathers and who are in their kids’ lives, whether they’re married or not, I just thought, ‘Man, this is a good opportunity to kind of normalize this because, if you turn on the TV right now, you wouldn’t think that this was the case. That was one of the biggest things.”



An image taken from the website of Matthew A. Cherry, an independent film maker who is producing the five-minute animated short called Hair Love.

ANIMATION 101: MONEY MATTERS, DIRECTOR MATTHEW CHERRY SAYS

Animation always seemed like a bigger market in the mind of Matthew A. Cherry.

A live-action feature might attract one adult accompanied by another, he says, but animated films can draw a crowd of youngsters: Perhaps one child with several friends along for a birthday party, often shepherded by a parent.

The downside to animated production is significant cost.

A former professional football receiver with several directing credits for live-action shorts and features, commercials and music videos, Cherry said friends in the industry have told him it could cost a major studio $1 million per minute for a full-length animated film.

“Being an independent filmmaker, that was completely out of my trajectory,” Cherry said from Los Angeles in an interview.

Cherry, now 35, has more than 82,000 followers on Twitter, and it’s a fairly safe assumption that among that contingent were several of the 4,981 backers who offered $284,058 US to a Kickstarter campaign for funding Hair Love, a five-minute animation.

“The reason why we did it as a short as compared to a feature, and I have done short films before, was just that this genre could work and also prove that people want to see characters of colour in an animation space,” he said.

Because beneficiaries receive Kickstarter funds for campaigns that reach or exceed their stated goals, Cherry, who had funded two previous projects that way, established Hair Love’s target at a relatively modest $75,000. Once that was reached, the “stretch goal” became $200,000, which was also surpassed easily.

In the world of animated films, Cherry said, money translates into technology — computer-generated figures and the like — and potentially more artists contracted to work on the project.

A budget breakdown on Hair Love’s Kickstarter page listed: storyboarding, $5,000; three-dimensional character designs, $10,000; environment design, $10,000; visual development on characters and environments (plus “color script”), $10,000; character modeling, texturing and rigging, $10,000; environment modeling and texturing, $10,000; hair, fur and clothes animation, $15,000; lighting/rendering/compositing, $10,000; animation, $15,000; editing, $10,000; sound design and music, $10,000; animation producer, $10,000; VFX, $5,000; business and legal expenses, $25,000; Kickstarter gifts and shipping. $25,000; Kickstarter fees, $20,000.

Cherry said he’d like to release Hair Love by next spring, perhaps in time for the March 9-18 run of the South by Southwest Film Festival, where he had premiered feature-length productions The Last Fall and 9 Rides.

“It just really depends on how long it takes to do this right,” he said. “I don’t want to rush it. I don’t want to put something out that is not as high quality just because we’re facing a deadline.”

His ideal distribution strategy would involve having a major studio acquire Hair Love for theatre showings before its own animated features.

“That would be my super ideal scenario,” Cherry said.

gholder@postmedia.com