UNALIVED is a satirical take on the effects of social media on our collective consciousness and the extremes that ‘clout-chasing’ drives people to. The film follows a group of wannabe TikTok influencers from the city who move to grandma’s house in the suburbs, in order to save on rent, cohabitate, and create what everyone needs more of… content! However, while building their pages and gaining followers, people in the house start to die in mysterious ways. Is this just a series of unfortunate events, or is someone trying to become the last influencer standing? With a delicious blend of comedy and horror, UNALIVED skewers the social media generation and asks deeper questions about how these apps are altering our very psyche.
We have a few big goals with UNALIVED. Firstly, we want to use this opportunity to develop ourselves as filmmakers by working with a larger budget. Our first short film, COAT CHECK, had a shoestring budget of $1200, was shot in only 15 hours, and used a skeleton crew. With our expanded budget for UNALIVED, we will invest in the equipment, the time, and–most importantly–the people who can take our artistry to the next level. In this vein, one of our values is to pay artists commensurately for their time and talent. We also want to use the short film version of UNALIVED as a proof of concept to develop the idea into a feature-length film. By proving that we can execute this film on a smaller scale, we will use UNALIVED as a work sample to attract investors and more collaborators. Finally, UNALIVED will add to the cultural conversation around our society’s obsession with social media. This film will challenge the viewer to contemplate the costs of ‘influencing’ and the morality of content consumption under capitalism. And all the while, UNALIVED will make the audience laugh, something desperately needed now more than ever.
In conjunction with creating a proof of concept, we will submit UNALIVED to the festival circuit in order to garner recognition for our work, with the ultimate goal of securing backing for the feature version. Thus, the marker of success will be our admittance into different film festivals as well as connecting with audiences in Chicago and across the country.
We simply could not do this without the generous support of our artistic community. Thanks for coming to our fundraising page and we cannot wait to share UNALIVED with you all!