The Found Footage Festival is an American film festival and live comedy event and featuring unusual and humorous found footage clips and films. History Founded in 2004, the Festival originated in Wisconsin and Minnesota by Joe Pickett, Nick Prueher and Geoff Haas, childhood friends from Wisconsin. While still in high school, Pickett and Prueher began collecting videos from garage sales, training videos from odd jobs, and copies of tapes from a video production house. The friends would then play selections from this collection for entertainment at parties, a practice which continued through their college years at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. In 2004, Pickett and Prueher quit their day jobs to focus on production of their first feature documentary, Dirty Country. They started the touring Found Footage Festival show to fund the production of the documentary. In addition to its regular touring schedule, the Festival has appeared at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival, Just For Laughs, the New York Comedy Festival, the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, and the Central Standard Film Festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Festival is currently based out of New York City. In April 2017, Gray Television filed a lawsuit against Prueher and Pickett for fraud and copyright infringement, after they appeared on multiple television morning shows (including Gray-owned WEAU-TV) as various fictitious "touring acts", including a fake strongman duo known as "Chop and Steele", and utilized the footage during their show as a critique of television stations only booking acts based on a press release and no further research. The parties agreed to a settlement the following year. In 2022, the feature documentary Chop & Steele, co-directed by Ben Steinbauer and Berndt Mader, made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The comedy film follows Prueher and Pickett as they book their gag strongman routine on unsuspecting morning news shows, but when their pranks go viral and land them in federal court with a vengeful media conglomerate, the stress of the lawsuit and pressure to continue their pranks threatens their livelihood and tests their lifelong friendship. The film includes appearances by comedians David Cross, Bobcat Goldthwait, Reggie Watts, and Howie Mandel. Show structure The found clips are projected onto a theater screen, with the "host/curators" hosting the event from a staging area in the front. The clips are presented in succession from a master DVD, with the hosts controlling the timing and order