5-Second Films slashes into new territory with feature

Since Vine is now everyone’s friendly neighborhood supplier of six-second morsels of entertainment, it’s easy to forget that not that long ago, making comedy pieces that last for far less time than it takes to tie your shoe did nit exist. Years before all of that, before “doing it for the Vine” was a part of our lexicon and 1.5 billion loops were playing daily on the website, 5-Second Films was entertaining the Internet without the luxury of that decadent sixth second.

Founded in the mid-2000s a group of USC School of Cinematic Arts students and led by screenwriting major Brian Firenzi began making exactly what their group title suggests: short, often absurdist comedy clips, all of which are only five seconds in length. The company launched its website, 5secondfilms.com, in 2008 and proceeded to gain an Internet cult following. Now, after seven years of releasing short films five days a week almost every week, the team has completed a feature film. Clocking in at just over 93 minutes — that’s 1,120 times the screentime they are used to working with — Dude Bro Party Massacre III (there is no I and II) is set to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival in mid-June.

By all appearances, the film takes the absurdist humor that 5SF is used to providing and turns the dial up several notches. From the very beginning, the humor of 5-Second Films was out there. After having come up with the concept at the annual Ed Wood film festival, Firenzi and his film student friends in New North quickly found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, five seconds did not allow a lot of time for plot development.

What the clips lacked in plot development, however, they more than made up for in quick-hitting humor. This often took the form of a compelling image or some classic slapstick. From the very beginning though, there was a strong vein of absurdity — often deliciously dark — in the films they were making. The groups first big hit, Magic Show Volunteer, features now-longtime 5SF cast member Olivia Taylor Dudley coming to the stage of a magic show. The magician, played by Firenzi, notes that she is pregnant, declares “not anymore” and makes her belly disappear. The camera cuts away from a horrified Dudley to Firenzi who is slowly removing a newborn child from his mouth. The film now has 1.3 million views. It is clear that this twisted undercurrent was part of the appeal of 5SF from the very beginning. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Michael Rousselet, a longtime 5SF castmember who was there almost from the beginning, said it took a lot of work to get the films off the ground.

“[Firenzi] was sociopathically stubborn about ‘I’m going to do this every day’ when the videos were getting like 20 views each. He was like, ‘No. Gotta keep posting.’ And, really, that’s what it took. For a few months you had to keep at it, even though he was all alone in it, you just had to keep doing it,” Rousselet said.

The group went through a period during which only their friends were watching, but they fell in love with the format, according to Rousselet.

“We didn’t know what we were doing. We were addicted,” Rousselet said.

Soon, after the success of Magic Show Volunteer, the group began to attract more and more viewers. Eventually celebrities such as Patton Oswalt, Peter Stormare and Weird Al Yankovic began to express their appreciation for the shorts and eventually made cameos in them. The films were officially a hit.

After five years of hammering out those films, however, the group began to get restless. The highly creative group of USC SCA grads was itching to try its hand at a format longer than five seconds. This led to the start of the project to make Dude Bro Party Massacre III. Based on a popular five-second film and a fake trailer they made, the group launched a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $200,000. According to Rousselet, that process was “the most terrifying monkey knife fight up a wall of sand.” But eventually ,they burst past their fundraising goal — donors clearly took advantage of the Kickstarter reward, which allowed some fan pitches to be made into 5SFs — and began working in earnest on the film.

As Rousselet puts it, the actual production put the group through even more growing pains.

“We thought that the hard part was over. But [the production] was also an uphill battle because our script was so insane and ambitious and big that the producers were like, ‘If you really want to make this, there’s not way you can do this with this budget.’ So we had to make a lot of production sacrifices,” Rousselet said.

One such sacrifice that they highlighted was the conversion of their house into a variety of sets.

The scriptwriting process sounds exactly like one would imagine it to go when a group used to writing five-second shorts decides to write a 90-minute movie. Firenzi, Rousselet and the gang nailed down an overall structure of story beats then divided up the writing responsibilities among the different 5SF cast members.

“Because this is a B horror movie and everything is very tongue in cheek and campy, we gave everyone scene numbers and we were like, ‘O.K., you do not talk to anybody else. All you have is the outline and the character breakdown. Now go write something.’ And we Frankensteined it together, just to see what it was, and it was hysterical,” Rousselet said.

But it was unfilmable. So they whittled it down to a workable script, with the story still evolving as the filming began.

John Salmon, another longtime 5SF cast member, said the filming itself mirrored the longtime 5SF style of essentially making it up on the fly with a talented group of people.

“We knew that we could manufacture things,” Salmon said. “5SF has that aesthetic where if a guy needs to fly off a skyscraper we’ll just have a Final Cut Pro animation of a guy flying off a skyscraper and, even if it looks like sh-t, it’s really funny anyway.”

So years of learning how to improvise on the hard schedule of five films a week, every week gave the group the ability to make their well-earned Kickstarter dollars stretch out as far as they could.

“There was a lot of stuff where they told us, ‘There’s no way you can do this,’” Rousselet said, “We were like, ‘We’re gonna f-cking do this,’ and we did it.”

Dude Bro Party Massacre III has a trailer out and based on 5SF’s style, the movie will likely be as insane as their short films. But the team has proven time and time again that they know how to walk the line between the hilarious and the bizarre, and DBPM3 looks like the logical extension of that ability. It will be fascinating to see just how crazy these guys get.