#blueficusstudios

Welcome to the interview with Kale and Mike, the stars of “Questions with Professor Amstel!” I was lucky enough to be able to interview these two about the history of Blue Ficus Studios and what they see as the future of this hilarious and ingenious project! I interviewed the two separately but have combined there answers into one interview so you can see the two different sides of Blue Ficus Studios! My name is Krystal and I hope you enjoy a glimpse of the past and future with Blue Ficus Studios!

1. Where did the idea of Blue Ficus Studios come from?

Mike: I think the idea for Blue Ficus Studios came back when Kale and I both were working in a recording studio and wanted some place outside of it to do some work. I remember when the first name for it was “Piss In A Ficus” Studios (Where that idea came from, I have no friggin clue.) and I wanted to shorten it to PIAF Studios. When the studio we were working at closed down, we continued to do some music work in someone’s home studio. During that period I slowly accumulated recording gear. At a certain point I had enough where we decided to do some recording in Kale’s garage and that was the birth of Blue Ficus.

Kale: Me and Mike met working as interns at a studio in Corona, CA and we were watching Fairly Odd Parents in the studio lounge. That episode was about office plants, and we said lets get a ficus and paint it, and we can call it ficus studios. (Obviously that didn’t stay the same). I mainly wanted to get a ficus so i could pee indoors without a toilet. 

2. Who’s idea was the show “Questions with Professor Amstel” or was it a combined idea?

Mike: The idea for “Questions With Professor Amstel” was pretty much all Kale’s idea. He wanted to do a comedy show and he wanted me to shoot it. I forget the rest of the pitch, but he wanted me to reprise my role as Professor Amstel which had previously been a character I had voiced on his college graduation senior project. So it was Kale’s idea to do material that was true to his life and then it was up to me to flesh out this truly bizarre Amstel character with as much not true to life material as possible. Kale’s real, Amstel’s not; that’s what the idea of the show came to be about.

Kale: I don’t really remember how we came up with the idea for the show. Amstel’s a character that we developed for a set of skits on my senior project in college. Where Amstel played a college professor who gave shitty advice.

3. What is your process for coming up with episode ideas? Do you write scripts or wing it?

Mike: Episode ideas are all Kale’s responsibility. So far I have only written one script (Which I think we’ll be doing soon), otherwise he has come up with everything. He’ll write all of his dialogue and then send me the script with the spaces left for me to reply to his questions. Everything he says, he writes. Everything I say, I write. I’d say about 90% of what’s said in the show is written out beforehand (or at least already in mind to be performed). We don’t have a lot of time to shoot these episodes so we stick to the dialogue pretty tightly to keep things moving. There are moments like when Kale calls me by the wrong name, those are made up on the spot. A lot of the physical humor we make up while we’re shooting. There are little goofs and stuff not meant to be in the show that I work in anyhow because they’re funny; you couldn’t write those moments ahead of time.

Kale: I pretty much just talk about shit that happens in my every day life. But we do write episodes like a month before we shoot, and the script is usually rewritten before we shoot. Also, I am a loose cannon and don’t stick to script very much.

4. What is your favorite episode and moment from the show?

Mike: My favorite episode is probably the handshakes episode (episode 8) because it involves a lot of physical humor which was fun to work out and get right when we were shooting it. Also because I got to kill off a major character completely out of the blue. I have a tie for my favorite moment and they’re both in episode four. The first is when Kale is pretending to be the fast food worker, I was dying when he was shooting that. And the other is when Amstel’s subtitles just start to conceptually fall apart during one of his stories and a Lemming sprite walks across the bottom of the screen. I was so happy that I had that idea and that it worked out as well as it did; I was immensely proud of that.

Kale: I think fast food was my favorite episode because we just started to figure out the show and its voice. My favorite moment was the dookie draws out takes, I pretty much made mike throw up on himself.

5. What do you see as the future for Blue Ficus Studios and the show “Questions with Professor Amstel?”

Mike: I’d like to see “Questions With Professor Amstel” move outside the confines of the garage. It’d be nice to shoot at other locations and broaden the horizons of the show. Maybe package in outside video segments so we can have little worlds exist within the show. It’d also be nice to have some other regular characters to interact with. We have a couple, but so far they’ve been one-offs; I’d like more. And in that same vein, it’d be great if we could bring in some outside writers to mess around with the little world we’ve set up for ourselves. Overall, I see the show as getting bigger and more elaborate. There has been some talk about adapting the show to be performed live. It’ll be interesting to see if that happens. As for Blue Ficus Studios in general, I’d love to keep shooting videos for it, either for “Questions With Professor Amstel” or any other ideas that come up. And I’d love to get back to recording more music. And, if we’re lucky, someday we’ll be able to have a dedicated space to shooting and recording material to share with the world. Until then, we’re just going to chill in the garage and do what we can.