Today we’d like to introduce you to And Company Productions.
Hello And Company Productions, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
The four of us met in the drama program of Mesa Community College while pursuing our associate’s degrees!
We are all performers who began to take an interest in the creative aspect of storytelling. Throughout our studies, we began to make comedy shorts as a way to make each other laugh, and that evolved into And Company Productions. We have now begun to expand our network to the larger pool of extremely talented filmmakers and actors in San Diego!
Our members are:
– Kristen Brodersen
– Jake Fagan
– Sam Schmidt
– Alice Torgersen
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The most difficult thing for us is that we have spent most of our operations being separated! While we all met in San Diego, for a majority of the time we have been making comedy shorts, at least two fundamental members of the company have been outside of San Diego.
Jake spent a large chunk of it in LA and has recently returned to SD (welcome back, Jake!), while Alice is actually Swedish and lives all the way across the world!
While the separation can be an obstacle, we have found that it can also be a creative challenge that yields some amazing ideas for content. It has truly tested our commitment to the work we do.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
We create online comedy shorts that approach and satirize a variety of topics. Being born on the internet, a lot of our comedy comes from internet culture. From horror comedy to mockumentary, we are really just looking to bend and break genre restrictions as much as possible while delivering a good laugh.
I think there is this phenomenon of “millennial humor” that we use to our advantage- coming from a generation that was raised online, we’ve found that jokes and tastes in humor are more connected than ever before, with everyone having access to the same media and influences. We try to use that to our advantage.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
I think the most important lesson we have learned as a collective is to respect our work, which is easier said than done. As beautifully ironic as it is to say that our comedy work should be taken seriously, we have learned over the 5 years we’ve been doing this that this IS creative work and deserves as much effort, time and attention as, say, a short horror film or drama.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: Instagram.com/andcompanychannel/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCEf_xOzJ3FHdDExMK62FetA
