On My Radar: Fatal Farm

What’s the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen recently?

JM: The Chili’s Fast Food Financing pop-up thing was really funny. Funny AND great social commentary. Why aren’t more casual dining establishments commenting on predatory payday loans? 

ZJ: It’s a couple of years old now, but it keeps resurfacing, so I’ll say the Sony patent for the technology that holds TV viewers hostage until they shout the name of the advertiser into their viewing device’s onboard microphone.

What website(s) do you use most regularly?

JM: Sometimes I accidentally spend two or three hours on randomstreetview.com. window-swap.com is also very good. 

ZJ: I spend a lot of time on Zillow, min/maxing like it’s a video game. What’s the most acreage I can buy in Montana? What’s the cheapest house in Kentucky? Largest square footage property with only a bathroom? Just clicking in the middle of nowhere to see what’s for sale. The Zillowgonewild blog and subreddit are great sources of entertainment for me. As I write this, I realise that it’s also a TV show [below]… I’m not sure it’d work without the interactivity.   

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought? 

JM: I bought a sound bar for my living room. I was living like a caveman and using the TV’s built-in speakers for three years. As a director, I probably shouldn’t be admitting this. 

ZJ: I went around recently and replaced every micro/mini-USB or lightning ported device…keyboards, controllers, remotes, screwdrivers, flashlights… with USB-C equivalents. I will not permit charging of any kind in my residence, except for C.

What product could you not live without?

JM: 3M Scotch Tape. Great stuff! 

ZJ: Diet Dr. Pepper. 

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year? 

JM: Marty Supreme was my favourite film this year. It’s taken some time, but I’m a Chalamet fan now. I’ll be a full-blown Chalamaniac soon. 

ZJ: This isn’t newly released, but earlier this year, researching something, I watched a marathon of 'take a serum' movies. Love potions, get-smart drugs, super soldier, etc. And among them I watched The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps for the first time. It was so aggressively tacky, cynical and scatological that it transcended into satire. And I don’t remember it ever being framed in that manner. I’d dismissed it as just ‘dumb’ like the Tropic Thunder parody trailer ridiculing it. But in the context of, 'Wow. They really hate their audience', and imagining its genuinely talented authors cynically layering Star Wars references onto fart jokes, disability jokes, bestiality, etc? It’s eviscerating the viewer. It’s a proto-Idiocracy.

What film do you think everyone should have seen? 

JM: Guy Maddin’s Careful. It’s just a perfectly strange and beautiful movie. One that not a lot of people know about. If you can find it, watch it! 

What’s your preferred social media platform?

JM: The only social media I enjoy lately is running my dog’s Instagram account. Makes me feel like I’m his intern. 

ZJ: I guess Reddit, if that counts. It’s the only one curate-able into a non-triggering destination. Mine has gotten pared down to mostly, like, brainteasers, cat videos and nostalgia.

What’s your favourite TV show?

JM: Family Feud, because I enjoy watching families feud with each other. 

ZJ: 30 Rock. I’ve done a couple of full-series rewatches now, and that show is so dense that it’s impossible to remember it all. I’ve done rewatches of Star Trek TNG, too, but those shows play back crystal clear familiar. For 30 Rock rewatches, I swear it seems like they’ve gone back in and added scenes and lines I missed. It’s just so layered.  

What’s your favourite podcast? 

JM: Rose Chat Podcast, which is a podcast about growing roses. Or Heavyweight. 

ZJ: Against better judgment, I’ll just answer truthfully and admit CumTown. 

What have you been most inspired by recently? 

JM: I’ve been listening to a lot of marimba music lately, and I think it’s making me feel more creative. But honestly, who knows? I could be out of my mind. 

If you could only listen to one music artist from now on, who would it be? 

JM: Despite all that marimba music I’ve been enjoying lately, I’d have to say Deion Sanders. I’m assuming if I can only listen to one artist for the rest of my life, something very wrong has happened in the world, and I would try to quickly induce permanent psychosis by listening to all 16 tracks off Deion’s 1994 album Prime Time, nonstop on repeat. 

ZJ: For the last few years, I’ve been playing Ollie Wride on repeat. I caught his name on a 'featured' credit for a synthpop track, found his solo work, and have seen him live a few times. He’s wildly charismatic on stage, and I love his albums; I'm confused as to why he isn’t a bigger deal. Maybe I like 80s pop too much to accurately gauge broader appeal

If there was one thing you could change about the advertising industry, what would it be? 

JM: The pitch/treatment process. 

ZJ: The pitch/treatment process. 

Who or what has most influenced your career? 

JM: I think we owe a lot to Tim & Eric and Key & Peele for allowing us to build a body of VFX work that led to us transitioning into directing. 

ZJ: The Lonely Island guys have been longtime supporters of ours. They just cold-called us back in the early days of YouTube after seeing a few videos we had made and asked if we would help them with some shorts. Everyone we’ve met professionally, and all the opportunities we’ve had, can be content traced back to that cold call. Every couple of years, they’ll circle back around with something new for us, and it’s always a 'drop everything, clear our schedules, and do it' opportunity. It’s invariably something great, and they opened the door for us. 

What scares you the most? 

JM: My own mortality.

ZJ: The future. 

What makes you happiest? 

JM: Making a chocolate chip cookie in a mini cast-iron skillet and then putting ice cream on top of that and then eating that. A skillet cookie with ice cream, if you will. 

ZJ: Going to sleep with nothing ‘due’ or ‘owed’, and nothing scheduled in the morning. 

Tell us one thing about yourself that most people wouldn’t know. 

JM: I have a rose garden, and I love roses. And I wish I had more room to plant more roses. But I don’t. 

ZJ: Everyone who knows me finds out fairly soon, but I have one of the preeminent 1980s GI Joe collections. I’ll tell people this, and they never comprehend the scope until they see its vastness. I attend conventions year-round, participate in trade forums and interact with OG designers. Prototypes, original package art, internal Hasbro documents, foreign market variations… it’s not a casual thing.