Started in 2004, the Found Footage Festival is a live comedy event and screening featuring odd and hilarious clips from VHS videotapes gathered from thrift stores, garage sales, warehouses, estate sales, and Dumpsters throughout the United States. It has its roots in the found art movement made famous by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, but maintains an irreverent sense of humor with its source material, similar to Found Magazine.
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History
The Festival originated in Wisconsin and Minnesota by Joe Pickett, Nick Prueher and Geoff Haas, childhood friends from Wisconsin, but now is based in New York City. While still in high school, Pickett and Prueher began collecting videos from garage sales, training videos from odd jobs, and copies of tapes from a video production house. The friends would then play selections from this collection for entertainment at parties. In 2004, Pickett and Prueher quit their day jobs to focus on production of their first feature documentary, Dirty Country. They started the touring Found Footage Festival show to fund the production of the documentary. In addition to its regular touring schedule, the Festival has appeared at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival, Just For Laughs (the Montreal comedy festival), the New York Comedy Festival, the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, and the Central Standard Film Festival in Minneapolis, MN.
Show structure
The found clips are projected onto a theater screen, with the "host/curators" hosting the event from a staging area in the front. The clips are presented in succession from a master DVD, with the hosts controlling the timing and order by remote control. In addition to introducing their found footage and presenting a brief history of how it was come across, the hosts offer running jokes and commentary during the clips, like a live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and implement live comedic sketches and pre-recorded bits between some of the selections.
Although the show evolves with new material for each tour, its midwestern influence is still prominent in its source material, and many of the clips come from this region of the country. In addition, the show continues to feature staple clips that have become fan favorites, including:
- It Only Takes a Second, a safety video from Federated Mutual Insurance
- Outtakes from Winnebago promotional videos featuring a foul-mouthed rep named Jack Rebney, now retired and suffers from blindness.
- Harvey Sid Fisher music videos of songs describing the zodiac
- clips of the public access television show Stairway to Stardom
- clips from "Carnival in Rio," a 1983 TV travelogue featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger
In 2006, the Found Footage Festival began offering for sale a DVD of the show's March 25, 2006, screening at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York, called Volume One: Live in Brooklyn. This has been supplemented by the 2007 release of a second DVD, "The Found Footage Festival Volume Two," as well as the 2008 release of "The Found Footage Festival Volume Three." In December 2009, the Found Footage Festival released Volume 4.
DVD Releases
- Found Footage Festival Volume One: Live in Brooklyn (2006)
- Found Footage Festival Volume Two (2007)
- Found Footage Festival Volume Three (2008)
- Found Footage Festival Volume Four (2009)
See also
References
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External links
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