Found Footage Festival at Sun-Ray

by Faith Bennett
Thrift stores and yard sales are good for a variety of things ranging from inexpensive furniture to outfits that Urban Outfitters wishes it could duplicate but both are also the best places to find the worst VHS tapes imaginable and that is exactly where the Found Footage Festival comes in.
The Found Footage Festival was started in 2004 by friends Nick Prueher (of the Colbert Report) and Joe Picket (of the Onion) and is coming to Jacksonville for the first time this week. Preuher and Picket host each show themselves as well as curating the edited mixture of their thrift store finds. You can expect a lot of training videos, work out tapes, PSAs, and even instructional videos about ferret care. The Found Footage Festival is kind of like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, except it is really more like the material Tim and Eric replicate. Prueher likens it to “doing show and tell for strangers” which they have been doing now for eight years.
Part of the appeal lies in the very on trend nostalgia for the eighties and nineties For those unfamiliar with the editing style, it involves taking small sections of the found footage and creating a solid work no longer than any other movie you would go to see at Sun Ray, sort the same way that you would never have to watch an entire home movie on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Unlike AFV however, the rules for the clips in the FFF have to be unintentionally funny. That means that the corporate rap videos, yo yo pranks, and sexy treadmill work outs were sincere.Were.
Sun Ray is the perfect venue for the show too. After screening an Everything Is Terrible show and two Tim and Eric features before they definitely have the audience and they have pizza which compliments any video showing of this kind.