Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg are the British-Canadian-American filmmaking duo behind the 2024 short film Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded, the dog-friendly screening series and book Cannes Dogs and the newly launched Vancouver festival, OFF-VIFF. They started Stupid Co in 2024, not only to make a really cool hat, but to build a home for their own artistic work and to create space for playfulness, creativity and independence for a growing community … With their second short, French Lessons, hitting festivals in 2025, plus features in pre and post-production, they bring together their own defined practices to create something more than the sum of its parts. Seriously though, let us know if you want a hat!
When we set out to release our lo-fi stoner surveillance short Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded online, one thing was immediately clear: we needed to release it as an endless loop.
Everything exists. From the sublime to the ridiculous, from left to right, up to down, in and out, round and round. It’s all there for us at any moment. There are endless patterns we can discern, endless ways to make sense of it all, endless vistas, perspectives, viewpoints and lookouts.
If you do not like where you are, move. You are not a tree … but what if you move and find you’ve ended up right where you began?
Nothing exists. We are as in a dream. Everything that was ever created can be compacted into nothing. The snake eats its tail, and we turn from ashes to dust.
It’s hard to write about something you’ve made because it does the talking itself.
Some people like our film Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded, some people don’t. Some people see themselves reflected back, some people are offended, some people think it could have been different or better, some people think it’s just right. Everything matters, nothing mattress, and we’re not here to tell you how to perceive this particular internet offering.
What does any of this have to do with surveillance you might ask? Great question.
One day, we went for a walk in a neighbourhood in Los Angeles. We wanted to find a trail, so we could spend some time in nature. Instead, we discovered (or were discovered by) talking cameras, armed with sunny robotic female voices, alerting us to the fact that we were currently being recorded.
We decided to make something out of it, because it scared us, and we wanted to know if it scared other people, too. Turns out, it does. It also makes some people feel safer. There are Facebook groups, subreddits, Twitter threads and memes all dedicated to Ring cameras and “Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded.” After we made the film, we discovered we’d unknowingly jumped on a bandwagon.
Letterboxd user JustSomeLamp arguably had something more insightful to say than we did:
We get it, too …
bandsaboutmovies wrote another favorite Letterboxd review that gave us food for thought:
Why do we keep spiraling back to nothing and are we ever going to get to something?
In the bastardized words of Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern in Jurassic Park (definitely Anna’s favorite film of all time), “God creates dinosaurs, God destroys dinosaurs, God creates man, man creates Ring cameras, Ring cameras destroy man, Ring cameras inherit the earth!”
Ring ring ring ring ring.
We weren’t expecting to hear about other people coming face-to-face with other forms of perceptions and misconceptions when we made Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded. Or about chihuahuas, or how people didn’t like the film but did like Anna’s jacket, or have been high and felt this way many times too …
We don’t think that Ring knew that their at-home surveillance cameras, now adorned on doorbells, garages, roofs and backyard fences, would inspire so much creativity when it decided to build and sell these cameras. Maybe Ring should start a fund for films made on their cameras. That would be a nice thing to come out of all of this. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Who knows. Ring, if you’re interested, let’s talk!
So what was the point of it all? Why an endless loop? Are you in the “loop” yet (wink, wink), or should we keep going?
We hope you have fun, we hope you please enjoy, we hope you smoke a joint, or don’t, we hope that you take a walk, have a lovely and peaceful time or, don’t and get accosted by cameras too … We hope you think about trying something different, making your own form of an endless loop, try to break the loop, make stuff with friends, experiment, chill, eat some tasty food, dance, whatever and yeah … We hope you get the point and if you ask us again what the point is … well, we guess the point is, that there is no point: welcome to the endless loop.
