Hey, What’s A California Amish?

Looking for a hot new collective of Starbucks slurping, tofu-eating religious traditionalists with a surprising distaste for modern technology? Looking to hire a go-getting, young actor/model/blacksmith/candlestick maker for your latest project?

Keep looking. Despite the paradoxical west coast old-country tradition evoked by their name, California Amish, the new studio from longtime collaborators Chris Hughlett and Aaron Rosenbloom, is galloping toward the original, the novel, and the new. As a live-action production company with a focus on comedic work and unconventional markets, the nimble new studio plans to take on any job in any medium, from broadcast to web, regardless of size.

“Aaron and I have always embraced a no-limits approach, and we want to establish ourselves as the go-to studio for out-of-the-box advertising, atypical markets, and unsolvable creative dilemmas” explains Hughlett.

Though based in New York, the studio will hardly be constrained to local talent. With a deep pool of vendors and talent stretching from LA to Portland to Austin to Chicago to New York, California Amish will be able to provide talent in any place to fill any need it deems necessary for any given project.

“We have a unique ability to move across the production landscape, matching talent and location with a client’s needs, no matter what those happen to be,” states Rosenbloom. “Whatever the creative challenge, we will summon the talent and the resources to meet it.”

The fruits of the studio’s creative vortex will be on display at the San Jose International Short Film Festival in late October,with the latest screening of Rosenbloom’s Bananas, which premiered at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. The intense 7:00 exploration of the banana’s supposed inferiority to all other fruit is a sprawling, highly watchable parody done as a daring blend of drama and art.

Hughlett and Rosenbloom have been dazzling audiences together for some time. Their Brasil Quest game and installation drew enormous crowds to Times Square for the chance to win a trip to Brazil. Their faux-intense Capri Sun mini-documentary – in which they enlisted a crack team of inventors and deep thinkers to foil NFL Redskins tight end Niles Paul’s teammates from stealing his juice – is representative of the sort of off-the-wall, hilarious and engrossing marketing that they intend to focus on.