By: KEVIN JOLLY
Staff Writer
Alan Resnick is a filmmaker and artist who’s created several notable projects over his career. He first started gaining attention with a solo project on Youtube with a channel called “alantutorial”. This was his first major step into the surreal and horror genre, and since then Resnick’s been hired by Adult Swim where he’s continued to create more projects with higher budgets. Some of these works are “Unedited Footage of a Bear”, and “This House Has People in it”.
Probably my favorite project from Resnick and as I mentioned his first, is “alantutorial”. Alantutorial is a channel on Youtube in which Resnick himself played a parody of the vast ocean of impractical tutorial videos on Youtube, as we see a story develop over the course of around 60 short videos. The first couple of videos shows Alan, who seems to be mentally unwell as he demonstrates with great difficulty how to perform bizarre and useless acts. From creating these strange videos to becoming homeless, and then being kidnapped, alantutorial tells a captivating and thought-provoking story with excellent touches of comedy and horror. Watching through the whole channel only takes a bit under two hours, so I would highly recommend watching through the channel alantutorial on Youtube.
Resnick’s most well-known project is “Unedited Footage of a Bear” which was made for Adult Swim. Unedited Footage of a Bear is the exact opposite of its title, as the real story is within a fake advertisement that takes up the vast majority of a man recording a bear. The advertisement is for a prescription drug but soon turns twisted and violent, and eerily horrific. Unedited Footage of a Bear is only ten minutes long so I highly recommend just giving it a shot despite its surrealist atmosphere which may not be for everyone.
Resnick’s also worked on a few other notable projects, like “This House Has People in It” which is also very interesting and a large assortment of much smaller indie short films on his main Youtube channel. His career is still pretty early in development, so it’s hard to say whether he’s found what he’ll stick with yet, but hopefully, we can get to see some more work from this eccentric and fascinating filmmaker and artist.