Who Knew?Episode 6 - Derek Fellat, IO
(I just spent in the neighborhood of 200 hours cutting the last half of this series together, so please indulge me for a bit here.)
Okay. So in March of 2007, armed with an awful DV camera, I set out with my friend from high school to make a Channel 101 pilot. It, uh, didn’t go very well, so we resolved to try again in the summer - and to turn our little idea into an actual narrative arc. Three months later, we had obtained a slightly less awful DV camera, and while reshooting the pilot script for what would eventually become Episode 1, we brainstormed ideas for a larger story. We tossed some ideas around until I said, “You know, I keep picturing Alex Moore (“Ice Cream Man”) sitting cross-legged, naked and covered in ice cream, ranting about the capitalist system.”
Once Alex agreed to do the scene, the rest kind of wrote itself. We all had jobs or outside commitments, so we ended up shooting most of the series in an incredibly rushed fashion over the course of four days. Most of the dialogue you hear in the finished product was improvised as no one had time to learn their lines, and I had no idea how to competently produce or direct, so the raw footage turned out to be a nightmare of camera mistakes, bloopers and audio glitches. For the next two years I would occasionally look over the footage and become deeply depressed by the fact that it was possible to make something so horrible. But now it’s done, and I even think it came out halfway decent… and I was always kind of fond of the completely ridiculous/implausible master plan we hashed out. Capitalism serving as a facade for the Illuminati’s master plan of having melting ice cream become the ultimate commodity in a postapocalyptic society and the inevitable endpoint to the corporate strategy of planned obsolescence… still as hilarious as it is nonsensical.
Anyway, it’s done, and now I can check off the biggest item by far on my to-do list. If you’d like to watch the entire series, there are playlists on both YouTube (here) and Vimeo (here) for you to easily do so.
