What Were We Thinking
A History
OK, let me get this off my chest, because there is no beating around the bush on this one. Yes WWWT was inspired by Jackass. Yes I know we're not Johnny Knoxville and the gang, but we still have fun doing this and we enjoy making people laugh. We probably won't ever get to be as hardcore as them because we lack budget and are not being paid lots of $$ to do so. To be honest, if it wasn't for Jackass, I wouldn't be where I am right now, in college for Film and Television Production and getting married to the most amazing girl in the world. Chances are if I never watched that show, I would still be an antisocial reject with the personality of a thumb tack. But that's a whole other story.
Moving on...
What Were We Thinking? started about 5-6 years ago by myself and Jamie. We are cousins who acted, and still act, more like brothers. Jamie basically saved me from myself. I wanted to be the next great white rapper. He exposed me to metal/rock and got me into CKY and Jackass (Thank you my friend) and that pretty much got the ball rolling.
Jamie came up one weekend with a video camera courtesy of Dylan. All we ever filmed was stuff in the winter, because we couldn't think of anything else to do besides sledding and stuff with ice. Plus the snow helped give us a soft landing. What a bunch of wuss-bags. We eventually moved up (or down, depends how you look at it) to web cam shows where we just did stupid stuff in front of a webcam. Exciting, really. One of our finest moments was when he smashed me upside the head with a metal bowl. We didn’t know what to do with these videos. I had no idea how to edit anything, other than adding text to a video. We were even original and creative to call it “Dumbass”. Go us! It wasn't until I hit high school that things really started to pick up.
I met a young red headed lad named Kyle. We fell in lo---became friends after causing so much shit in our English class. Detention became easier and easier to get out of every week because our teacher just got tired of staying after school. Kyle got me skateboarding more which was a waste of his time because I barely learned anything, and still holds that title. I soon got into a communications technology class taught by the great Mr. Heeney. Oh man, if it wasn't for him I don't know this would have gone. He lent me the school video camera every weekend, every holiday, every summer even. He was awesome. He knew I wanted to make movies and he gave me the tools and the know how to do so. He would let me come into any of his classes and take over that back room to do my thing. He was even cool to let Kyle come hangout in the classroom. I remember one day I was editing some sledding videos (holy shit we did a lot of sledding), and Kyle came banging on the door. I let him in and he showed me the scooter incident which has become well liked by people. I can't thank you enough Mr. Heeney.
Kyle and I basically filmed some skateboarding, snowboarding and sledding. The skateboarding was decent, I was always jealous of how quickly Kyle learned. Bastard. We started hanging out with this new guy named Peter. He was the funniest kid in school. He used to bring this razor scooter to school and we would go behind in the teacher’s parking lot and film us playing skate...on a scooter. I almost broke my arm and we thought it was the funniest thing ever. I remember wanting to introduce these guys to Jamie so badly. He finally came over one Friday and visited us at school. He was escorted off the property because they thought he looked dangerous. We got together more often and started to film these scooter skate games. We then moved on to filming us taking this scooter down hills and into ditches and whatever we could find. It’s funny how stupid evolves into stupider. I think this is where Volume One started taking shape. I wish I still had those tapes, I don't know what happened to them.
Peter introduced Kyle, Jamie and I to Mike and Ryan. His two closest friends who are the coolest twins I have ever met. They started coming out with us when we went skateboarding more often. It wasn't long before we felt like we have known Mike and Ryan all our lives. They were so pumped to start filming. Ryan even went out and bought his trademark hat he wore while we were filming. He was like the Slash of bass guitar. Ryan’s enthusiasm made me want this movie to work. Mike liked to go all out. He seemed like the competitive type up until he fucked his back up doing that shopping cart during a day of shooting. He upstaged us all and made us look like pussies that day. He had nothing else to prove. Well played Mike, well played.
Enter Adam. This guy had style that put my black clothes wearing ass to shame. He added that style that we needed to the group. He was always up for filming stupid shit at the park and anywhere we went. What I liked about Adam is whatever he thought was funny, he did it, and that takes balls to do. He would always push me to skate more, but I never listened. Who knows where I could be now if I listened? His commentary while filming added substance to my flat ideas. I thank you for that Adam.
It wasn't until Canada Day, where we were all at Denny's discussing our plans for the summer. We were talking about that Viva La Bam episode where they did the scavenger hunt (Please refer to the first paragraph). We all thought how fun it would be to do one ourselves. A couple of weeks pass by and everyone gets an E-mail telling them a date and a time to meet at my house. It was originally going to be teams, but we had 1 camera so we just went around Brampton trying to see how many things on the list we could get done by 12:00 AM. We didn't succeed, that's for sure. We got some good footage. After watching all the footage I wanted to shoot more. Around this time, I met a guy named Johnny and a guy Named Jeff, but we will get to them in a second.
I told the guys my plan to turn this into a movie for our friends to enjoy. They all thought that was a great idea. Jamie was coming up almost every weekend now. We were filming nonstop. I don't even remember how many tapes worth of footage we shot. We had all this footage from everyone crashing at my house one night to just random trips to the skate park. It was awesome. I realized I had enough footage to put together a small movie. Man was the editing process long. This is where Jeff came into play. He was awesome enough to let me use some of Jia Harlow’s songs and some songs from Buttons and Blankets (Both are bands started by him). I ended up finishing Volume One and sold quite a few copies to friends. We didn't really hit that dream of getting people we didn't know to watch it.
Years passed since Volume One, and it kind of faded into oblivion. It still gets brought up on the rare occasion. Unfortunately, after high school everyone started going their separate ways. There were no fights or anything...everyone just moved on. I wish those guys nothing but luck in the future, and I thank them whole heartedly for letting me do Volume One.
A couple of years passed. I still kept contact with Kyle, and of course Jamie. Ok, remember that guy I said I met? Johnny? Well he kind of got me back into the habit of shooting. He was into movies and we had the exact same interests which made discussions a lot easier. I introduced Jamie and Kyle to Johnny and new friendships were appearing. Kyle and I kept out of touch for a while after that, I don't remember why, but we were still friends...just never saw each other for a good while. Jamie, Johnny and I would film whatever we could. We wanted to make a Volume Two, but didn't know where to go from there. We got together a gang of people (you guys know who you are!) but with everyone living so damn far from each other, it made it hard to get together and the project fell apart before it could ever get off the ground.
At this point, it was only Johnny and I. We tried working on other projects (Batman vs. Jason, Stark Raving Madness - A Batman Fan Film etc.) but like Volume Two, nothing ever really took off due to issues with people we worked with. Not their faults, they had lives to lead. I randomly started talking to Kyle again, and we keep in contact now. That is one friendship I don't want to lose. He is one of the originals, we can’t lose that!
Jeff and I started talking more and we even got to the point of starting a band together. We don’t have a name yet, but we are going to be writing some songs for the movie.
Between then and now I met a few crazy characters. I aspiring hip hop artist who goes by Charlie Br0wn. He is probably one of the nicest guys I have met and is extremely funny. He has more flow then a river of flowing water. The guy has talent. It pisses me off that he hasn’t been picked up by a label or something yet. Much like Johnny, he has the same interests as me so it made it easier to get along with him.
I met this next character at The Phoenix in Toronto. His name was Marko. Well, it still is Marko, but you get the idea. We never really spoke, but it was a:
"hey Erik, good to see you again," said Marko.
"You too Marko, good to see you too," said Erik.
We never really started hanging out until my girlfriend Steph (now fiancé) went to school with Marko's girlfriend Betty. When they would hangout, Marko and I would hangout. We instantly became bffffs (best fucking friends forever, oFFicially). It was funny because apparently he wanted to get into our little group and I always thought he was too cool and didn’t like me. It’s funny how that works out. It actually worked out very well. He has a killer sense of humour and shit that only I would find funny can be shared with him as onlookers look on with unimpressed looks on their face.
At this point, I never had any intention of filming stuff again for WWWT.
It wasn't until a month or two ago, it was brought up with Steph. I forget how it became but we talked about me finally doing a second one. I said ok. It's weird because someone asked me literally like a week before about Volume One, and asked if I ever did a Volume Two. I needed a team. Jamie was in of course. I talked about it with my partner in crime, Johnny who loved the idea. Marko was more than happy to join up and so was Mr. Br0wn. I had to ask Kyle twice to be in it and he finally agreed.
So here we are, working on Volume Two. I had the support of my amazing fiancé which is the most important thing to me. I also have the support of my friends and a great team backing me up. I want to take this one to the next WWWT level. I don't know what that means, but I like it.
We are hoping to bring you more production value then Volume One had. We are actually putting thought and effort into this. We want to bring everyone a great product. We want to bring you something you will take to your friends and say, “Man, you gotta watch this! It’s fucking hilarious!”
We know what we are doing. We take safety precautions. I know everyone says this, but we like to think we separate ourselves from the other groups that are inspired by Jackass. We like to think it’s more about going out of our way to cause pain and injury. We like to find humour in the possible consequence of an outlandish idea.
What does the future hold for us? No idea. The only way to find out is to push forward.... maybe we will even sell a t-shirt.
-Erik Dudley
