Found Footage Festival

Found Footage Fest Founders Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher
 

How did The Found Footage Festival start out?
Co-founder Joe Pickett and I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and there wasn't a lot going on, you had to make your own fun. For us, that meant hanging out at thrift stores and charity shops all day looking for weird things to entertain ourselves. At first it was t-shirts, then the tapes from answering machines, and finally, in the early nineties, VHS tapes started showing up.

We found a Mr. T educational video, an Angela Lansbury exercise video, even a McDonald's training video, and we'd have screenings in my parents' basement for friends, offering a running commentary of jokes throughout. In 2004, we realised we had enough footage to make a ninety-minute show out of it, so we rented a room in the back of a bar in New York and hoped people would show up. To our surprise, the show sold out and we realised this might be more than just an inside joke. Now we have over 6,000 videos in our collection and we tour all-year-round showing them off to people.

How many people do you have out there sourcing videos for you?
The majority of the VHS tapes are found by me and Joe but since we've been touring for ten years now people donate videos to the cause. About once a week, we'll get a box of tapes in the mail from someone and it's always like Christmas morning for us. While we're in Nottingham we'll be digging around for new material but we'll only be in town for one day, so we'd encourage people to bring any of their local finds to the show at Broadway Cinema.

What are your personal favourite clips from the touring show?
In the show we're bringing to Nottingham, the standout for me is a video that's actually called How to Have Cybersex on the Internet. It's an instructional tape from 1997 hosted by a woman who goes through the boring step-by-step process of creating a screen name, finding a chat room, and so on, but then all-of-the-sudden she's topless. We can't tell whether the video was trying to be sexy or informational but it ends up being neither.

The show has been phenomenally popular with US audiences, but how do you think it will transfer to the UK?
This is our third tour of the UK and we've been really thrilled with the audience reactions here. What we've come to realise is that people laugh at the same parts but maybe for different reasons. In the States, audiences are laughing at how ridiculous they were back in the eighties and nineties and in Europe people are laughing at how ridiculous Americans were back then. And who doesn't love laughing at Americans?

Have you got any footage relevant to Nottingham? Maybe something with Robin Hood in?
Since this is our first time in Nottingham we don't have any local footage but have included our very first video found in the UK. I don't want to give too much away, but we found it at a charity shop in London last year and it's a carriage driving instructional video. The title is what really sold us: Between the Shafts. We'll be showing deconstructing it as part of this year's VHS Cover Slideshow.

Anything else you want to say to our readers?
I think the biggest selling point of the show is that it's footage you can't see anywhere else-- not online, not even on our own website - and that's increasingly rare when everything is available at your fingertips. Also, something magical happens when you take these videos that were never meant to be shown in public and project them on a big screen in a room full of people drinking beer. It's a communal experience that you don't get watching a YouTube video on a little window on your laptop at work, and we're looking forward to bringing it to Nottingham to the first time.

Found Footage Festival, Broadway Cinema, Tuesday 29 July 2014, 9pm, £10.

Found Footage Festival website