When John Loxterkamp left Belfast in August to attend college in New York City he had already been recognized as a filmmaker. The Fly, a four-minute short he coproduced with classmate Wes Sterrs, took first prize at the Maine Student Film and Video Festival in 2011 and was given a screening as part of the Maine International Film Festival that year.

Less well known are the roughly 100 films Loxterkamp produced himself during his last three years of high school. Most of those, along with The Fly, are archived on YouTube under the moniker SlyFoxComedy. Nearly all of them are unabashedly, often brilliantly, strange.

Describing one of Loxterkamp’s films is like trying to summarize a dream, which is to say it seems easy enough until you try (It’s worth noting here that the tidy storyline of The Fly was not written by Loxterkamp but by one of his collaborators on the film). They are not “dreamlike” in the sense of being fantastical or hallucinatory or nostalgic. What they are is vivid, and filled with the kind of unstated suppositions and shifts that can only be understood in the context of all the other vivid, unstated suppositions and shifts.

Before he left for New York, Loxterkamp talked about how he got the bug for filmmaking, how he works, who he looks to for inspiration, and what his parents think of his films (or his throwing food around the house).

Most were conceived and executed quickly, often at home with whichever friends happened to be around. They feature almost nothing in the way of sets, and the costumes and props that do appear seem to have been thrown together from objects at hand.

Loxterkamp occasionally drops in a slick, post-production special effect and when he does, the contrast is often enough to explode whatever seemed to be real or unreal about the scene up to that point. The trick plays to great effect in Calculator, which appears on YouTube with a laconic note that could apply to many of Loxterkamp’s films:

“There may or may not be plot twists,” it reads.

Before he left for New York, Loxterkamp talked about how he got the bug for filmmaking, how he works, who he looks to for inspiration, and what his parents think of his films (or his throwing food around the house).

How did you get started making videos?

The timeline’s a little fuzzy. When I was somewhere between four and six years old I had a mini crappy home video camera, but it really started when I was gifted a digital camcorder [age 12 or 13] and I took it out and recorded some videos of my friends, came back and edited them. I think my first niche was in editing. And then I kept making them. Probably the peak of my production was at age 15 or 16. I was making them like once a week. Just short films and stuff. It was really consistent and I developed some skills through that. I sort of slowed down recently because of school work and going to college.

How do the videos come together?

They’re mostly improv. I’ve never been much of a scriptwriter. Usually when I do videos I try to think of the funniest thing I can off the top of my head and just go with that. Pre-production we sort of come up with the beginning and middle, and then we just get to filming and hopefully something magic happens on screen. If it doesn’t, I guess I just kind of deal with it.

The closing credits of Foiled include a written summary of the story. Was that what you started with?

No. That was something that I did after we had filmed and edited it all, just like a little joke in itself: In case you skipped the entire video, here’s the synopsis, so you can laugh at that instead of watching the seven-minute production. That video was not planned at all, despite the synopsis at the end.

Your co-stars are your friends. Are any of them actors?

I wouldn’t really call them actors. They’re just sort of there and they can say funny things and make weird faces. So that’s sort of my criteria. I usually only work with my friends.

How long does it take to make one of the films, start to finish?

It depends. We can usually get it filmed in three or four hours unless it’s one that requires multiple settings. Five or six hours total [including editing] for most films.

A notable exception was The Fly. The film was completed in one night, but editing stretched into the early morning hours making it one of the longest pieces to produce. It was also fully scripted and storyboarded in advance and produced with a larger crew, which represented a break from Loxterkamp’s usual shoestring approach.

By contrast, his latest video, Swing Police, was conceived and executed in roughly an hour:

My friend Steve [Stephen Hess] and I have these weird jokes that we don’t even know why we come up with them. The Swing Police was one of them. So we just took it to a playground and filmed it in like half an hour and then I edited it in half an hour.

In the video you play the title role. What’s the uniform you’re wearing?

It was one of my mom’s weird suit trench coat things. I think it was the most detective-looking thing in the house. And the military sash I got from the Maskers Theater yard sale. I didn’t look like a policeman. Nothing looked like it was supposed to but I guess that’s part of the fun.... The video doesn’t make sense, and it’s sort of a joke so we wanted to elaborate on that.

Steve does a kind of James Cagney voice in the beginning.

I believe that’s what he was going for. We were originally going for a black-and-white feature where he was going to be a 1930s gangster/bank robber and he was going to be holding a sack of money, but we couldn’t get the money sack so I had a bowling trophy in my room and we used that because it looked shiny and gold. It just added to the joke of the video I guess, the fact that it was a bowling trophy.

There’s something I really like about the improv videos, and I had this impulse to dissect them and figure out what it was. But then you’re going to be doing so much more stuff. It can get poisonous to pin down aspects of what an artist is doing.

I don’t try to be just one thing. I hate it when people call me “YouTube kid” or “that guy who makes videos” because I really want to go into other art forms, or have the freedom to.  [With the improv videos] we don’t really even know where we’re going, so I guess it gives a spontaneity to it. Thinking about it too much, whatever idea I have, becomes sort of unfunny, so I have to pin it down in the moment while we’re filming it. Use it while it’s fresh.

Are you planning to do film at New York University?

As of right now I’m definitely leaning toward film. One thing I want to try is 3-D animation, CGI [computer-generated imagery]. Graphic design is always there on the side. But it’s mainly film. Nothing has really inspired me as much as the stars and directors and DPs [directors of photography] in film and television.

Asked about his influences, Loxterkamp cites the fluid cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, Director Wes Anderson’s precisely-timed panning shots, the inventive camera perspectives used in the TV series Breaking Bad and director Stanley Kubrick’s tense and lingering stationary shots in The Shining. The off-center comedy and generally weird timbre of his own videos, he said, is inspired by, and bears a fair resemblance to, the sketch comedy in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

Do you have a favorite video of yours, or a few favorites?

I usually like my films for how much fun I had while I was making them and how accomplished I felt when they were done. I really liked making the two-year anniversary special. Specifically, I really liked making The Interview. It’s the one where we threw a lot of food around the kitchen and sort of humiliated my friend Nick [Fortin], which is always fun to do.

With Nick, or anyone?

Mainly Nick. He’s that kid in the group. I don’t try to offend him. [The Interview] didn’t take long to film and it was great because we got to make disgusting coffee that we would later make Nick take a bite out of.

A bite?

It was coffee that I put ketchup and a banana and lettuce in, and he took a bite out of the banana peel. I think my favorite part of that was the sound he made when he bit into the banana — that little crisp sound, and it’s supposed to be coffee. There’s sort of a joke in that.

I also liked doing Swing Police and Homesick, which was with my Italian exchange student Francesco. And definitely The Fly. Wes and I work really well together. There’s no bickering or argument toward whether something should be a certain way. And it was very organized. We got pizzas, which made it a lot of fun.

Is that a sign of professionalism?

Yeah. Get the pizza for the crew. We had light people and camera people who were also our friends, but we gave them pizza, so they were professional, slightly.

What do your parents think about the films, or throwing a bunch of food around the house?

I think they’re fine with the food, as long as we clean it up. In terms of if they’re proud of me for my videos, I used to make some pretty adolescent films full of crude humor [this was in his sophomore year of high school, he said, when he was working with a different crew]. I don’t think they were proud of me then because my films were getting in the way of my school work. But in the past two years, I’ve improved my GPA, and made some better films. I’m sure they’re more proud of me now, but I’m sure there’s some sort of worry about how far I’m going to make it in film. I think they’re proud of me.

Loxterkamp, who often acts in his films, posed for a portrait in the sitting room of his home, a location that has served many times as a set. Over the course of several dozen photos, he tried out a handful of facial expressions recognizable from his films: afraid, angry, in conversation with someone outside of the frame.

Does it come naturally to act?

It’s easier to act when I’m yelling. You know, when I’m acting the most extreme emotions, it comes easily, but when I’m trying to be serious or talk normally it’s difficult, which is why in a lot of my films I sort of talk strange all the time... which has actually sort of happened to me… my vernacular... [his voice trailed off]

[laughter]

I have no idea what to do right now.