These are a bunch of questions that an uninformed visitor to Oh Cany Productions might ask... You might also want to check out the Cast & Crew Section for more information. And of course, there's always the movies...if a picture says a thousand words, a movie says a gajillion, right?

No, not at all. Actually, we think Canadians are funny...with their funny accents and thier socialism and their flappy two-part heads. Oh wait, that's only on South Park. Anyway, we're NOT Canadians at all.

Actually--I know this is unbelievable--but a member of Oh Cany Productions has actually come within thirty feet of a Canadian! As you can see in this snapshot from Six Flags Darien Lake, taken by an Oh Cany Productions fan and kilt-wearer by the name of Kevin Domanico in the summer of 2003, Oh Cany Productions member Peter Berg came into close proximity with a Canadian! How do we know he is Canadian, you ask? Well, we, the shrewd sleuths that we are, noticed that this man was wearing a shirt that says "I AM CANADIAN" with a large red maple leaf on the front. (Unfortunately, you can not read the Canadian man's T-Shirt because he is too far away in the photo...) Using our incredible detective skills, we asked him "Hey, are you Canadian?" and he said "Yes!" So naturally, we took a photo of this elusive beast before he disappeared back into the wilds of Canada and the opportunity was forever lost.

We also have seen the greatest and most revered celebrity of all time, Colin Mochrie of Whose Line is it Anyway? perform live, and as you may well know, Colin Mochrie is a native born-and-bred Canadian citizen!

So, as you can see, Oh Cany Productions has many deep-rooted connections to Canada!

We're all from Tioga County, New York, and we all went to high school at Owego Free Academy in Owego, NY. Now, most of us are now at college (though a few are still at OFA).

We live in a rural area, so we had no problem finding woods or the rural shack from Oh Cany--they're around us everyday. We do, however, have a hard time making city settings (just look at Oh Cany's New York City scene).

We named our production company after the second film that we made (and the first that wasn't for a school project), Oh Cany. Oh Cany tells the story of a Canadian mounty who is commissioned to track down and stop the rogue president Richard Nixon who is hiding somewhere in the United States. Click here to learn more about Oh Cany.

We decided to make Oh Cany about a Canadian Mounty tracking down Richard Nixon for two simple reasons: (1) we had the costumes already, and (2) as previously stated, we think Canadians are funny.

The first film we ever made as a group was Psychology Today, for our 11th Grade English class in fall, 2001. It's supposed to address the Arthur Miller play The Crucible and human child development, but somehow we worked in pirates, kidnapping, high speed chases, getaway cars, old scientists, Richard Nixon, family handshakes, dramatic fight scenes and grand larceny. We had a good time making it, so a week later, we started Oh Cany...the rest is history.

Almost all of Oh Cany movies are completely unscripted. Unless it was for a school project where we had to address certain things, these all lack scripts.

Of the unscripted movies, some are complete improvisation where we make no plans ahead of time except for very general details about the characters and the premise, while others are planned out very vaguely ahead of time so that the actors and the cameraman kind of know what to do and when to end.

Ned & Tyrell, for example, was completely improv all the way through. None of the lines or events were planned out. We just got in costumes, decided on our accents and that we were making a hunting show, and then shot it (Haha! Pun!). There was no planning whatsoever.

Oh Cany had basic planning of the scenes before they were started, where we had a quick discussion of what they would be about, what would happen and when they would end.

As for planning out our entire movies--we don't. We make them up as we go along...we do one scene, then stop and figure out what the next scene will be and then do that. We don't have an outline of what the plot and scenes and characters of the movies will be. We just make it up as we go along, one scene at a time. This is how Loaf, Oh Cany and others were made... We also seldom do retakes of any scenes after they're completed. Generally, once it's on video, it's there for good.

For the first two years of Oh Cany Productions, we used Sony Hi-8 analog video cameras. We started using Chris' camera, then when Jeff got a better camera (with a FLIP-OUT SCREEN!), we used that, then when Pete got a Sony Mini DV camera, we used that. The video quality is pretty bad on most of these videos, because a lot of them have been copied a few times before they finally made it into digital form.

Also, we're pretty bad at using video cameras, so the video is all shaky and you can always see the bumpy pans and tilts of our tripods because we're using crappy consumer grade equipment here.

No. Aside from on-the-fly editing or simply re-arranging scenes in our movies (which has only happened once or twice)...we DO NOT edit our movies. We shoot them straight through, live on tape because we didn't have the capability to edit until the summer of 2003, and now that we can edit, we really don't want to.

Note: The only truly edited Oh Cany Production is Mike's Big Day...(and a crappy little music video to the song Yakety Yak by the Coasters Pete made), both made in the summer of 2003.

Update (June 8, 2004): Well, I'm sad to say it, but we've finally caved. Now that we have the capability to edit our videos, we do editing where it's necessary. It makes the end products a whole lot better. Just look at Dolique...we could have never done that without editing. So yes, now we do editing for most of the major stuff we make.

With a boombox. If we wanted music in our movies, we would play it with a CD player really loud so that it would get captured by the on-camera microphone. Speaking of which, we don't use anything but the crappy on-camera microphone because we're poor, time-limited and don't really care.

Yes.

We just have them... I guess we all save our old Halloween costumes, and like to dress up in general...plus we're creative with our resources. A lot of times we make characters based on the costumes that we have. Anyway, Chris has a whole attic full of costumes, Jeff has a lot of interesting costumes for some reason, and Pete has a lot of costumes, especially caveman/Renaissance/Indian stuff because of his family's neandrathal lifestyle. Other members of Oh Cany productions have also contributed costumes over the years.

Mostly in and around Owego, NY, where we live. A lot of these movies are shot at either Jeff or Chris' house. However, some of these movies are shot on location, like the second half of Oh Cany (shot on the way to Colorado, in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, etc.) and the West Virginia stuff was obviously shot in West Virginia.

One of the main reasons we made these little films was because we kind of wanted people to see them...not sure why...but the Internet is a great medium to do that with. (Plus, it's cheap.)

Anyway, Pete was bored one day, and his friends (the other Oh Cany people) kept on asking him to make them a DVD copy of all the videos...and...he doesn't have a DVD burner and making Video CDs would be a real pain....and he's pretty good with websites... so he did this. Eventually, there will be DVD versions of all the movies available though!

We're demented and we think it's funny...and for some reason, Jeff is strangely obsessed with showing off his feminine side...

Um....er....uh....

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LOOK--THERE'S ELVIS!!!

::running away::

That bluegrass song is called Banjos Prepare for Battle / Bluegras Breakdown, and it's quite possibly the fastest bluegrass song we've ever heard. The reason we use it so much is because it's so fast, the notes are so short and quick and there's so little melody that we can play the music in the background with a boombox and cut between different scenes and angles without a large noticable difference in the background music. In fact, it's the only music we've really found that we can cut and start playing back anywhere in the song with no distinguishable difference, so it's just perfect for our ghetto quality productions.

As for the mounty and the dressed up dog--(1) we think they're funny, (2) we have the costumes and these things are always accessible, (3) we're so lame that we've resorted to parodying ourselves rather than coming up with new ideas.

Forty-two.