There has never been a better time to be an actor, with the last year alone seeing major strides across new media entertainment that make it easier than ever to create work and get it seen by the masses. One of the most exciting new projects was “Sickhouse,” the first-ever feature-length film on Snapchat.
Founded five years ago in 2011, the image- and message-sharing app has premiered several game-changing features over the last few years—particularly the app’s story feature, which allows individual users and media and entertainment brands to create real-time videos and share them publicly for 24 hours before the video expires. Through it, the actors and creators of “Sickhouse” premiered the film in 10-second chronological snippets and snaps over five days in April–May 2016. The film is now available for download on Vimeo, but star Andrea Russett first hosted the film on her Snapchat account, andwizzle, which boasts hundreds of thousands of followers. The young actor’s YouTube channel also clocks in at 2.6 million subscribers.
“It started with that conceit of ‘Here’s an opportunity to do something cool. Let’s figure out how to do it,’ ” says Jake Avnet, chief operating officer of Indigenous Media, the new media production company behind “Sickhouse.” “Of course, there’s no blueprint for this, [so] we just had to kind of put our heads together and figure out what we thought might work.”
Like “The Blair Witch Project” and countless other found footage horror flicks before it, “Sickhouse” follows Russett and co-stars Laine Neil, Sean O’Donnell, Jc Caylen, and Lukas Gage (all social content creators themselves) as they go into the woods to investigate the fabled Sickhouse, an isolated cabin outside Los Angeles with a dark, twisted past. Due to the nature of the plot and production, the actors’ fans were not told they were watching a film. It simply unfolded as if it were reality.
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Written and directed by Hannah Macpherson, casting for the 68-minute “Sickhouse” was particularly important. The actors themselves were real-time creators, so they had to have a previously established audience via their own social accounts. That’s what made a content creator like Russett the perfect candidate.
“Obviously this is such an unusual and unconventional project. Whoever we spoke with that felt connected with it really had to have the imagination to understand what it is we were trying to achieve and ultimately be a partner for us,” Avnet says. “[Russett] loved the concept. She came full of great ideas and became a fantastic collaborator.”
Avnet and Indigenous Media are no strangers to creating entertainment for the new frontier of content consumption. Touted as a “new kind of studio…dedicated to telling a wide range of stories across a wide range of formats,” the production company has its hands in all forms of new media creation, perhaps most notably with its YouTube channel “Wigs.”
Avnet says that if you are an actor or an independent creator, the best way to get on his and his Indigenous colleagues’ radar is to keep doing what you’re doing. Proof of concept by way of a finished product is an actor’s best bet to be asked to partner and sign on the dotted line.
“As a company, we’re always looking for interesting creators to partner with,” he says. “We live in this really exciting time for creators where the distribution pipelines are completely open. They used to be controlled by major media companies and now you have a situation where anybody can tell a story and anybody can get discovered. The most important thing, always, is to make stuff…. [Indigenous Media is] on the lookout for that. We love storytellers who are doing things on their own and can do things on their own. We have a lot of resources that we’re able to put to work in helping those businesses mature.”
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