Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Smart Blonde TV+

Instagram: 30.3K Followers

Youtube: 20.5K Followers

Tik Tok: 12.3K Followers

What Is Smart Blonde TV+?

Smart Blonde TV+ is the comedy project from Sutter Nolan and Lars Midthun, two Minnesota-born performers who met at The Groundlings and started turning relationship arguments into sketches.

Their videos usually start from the kind of small relationship tension that feels ridiculous until you recognize it. A boyfriend gets quiet for no clear reason, a girlfriend starts reading meaning into the quiet, a coffee date becomes a referendum on the entire future, and some tiny domestic inconvenience suddenly feels like proof that everyone involved is unwell. The joke is not that couples fight. The joke is how little it takes for normal people to become insane once feelings enter the room.

Sutter Nolan brings the sketch background. She trained at The Groundlings, Second City, iO, and Pretty Funny Women, and Smart Blonde needs exactly that kind of performer: someone who can go broad without making the joke feel fake. Nolan can play the romantic lead who knows the genre is stupid, the girlfriend trying too hard to seem fine, or the Midwestern innocent who is only innocent until the bit turns. The characters are heightened, but they still feel like people you have met, dated, avoided, or been related to.

Lars Midthun brings the longform side. Before Smart Blonde, he directed The Way North, a feature documentary about his grandfather retracing a World War II story through Norway. Smart Blonde is a completely different lane, but it explains why the account keeps pointing past the sketch.

They launched Smart Blonde Films in 2023 and made Lemonade of Love, a rom-com parody short that became the seed for Love You to Death. The feature takes the same relationship-comedy language and lets it curdle into horror. The setup begins in rom-com territory, then keeps pushing the couple dynamic until the sweet parts start feeling dangerous.

Smart Blonde already works in the space where romance starts to feel unstable. The sketches take normal couple behavior and push it just far enough that a sweet moment begins to look suspicious, a small misunderstanding starts carrying too much weight, and the person you were supposed to trust suddenly feels like they might be performing for you. The horror is not being pasted onto the comedy. It is coming out of the same relationship anxiety the sketches have been playing with from the beginning.

The feature path has had the kind of bad luck independent filmmakers know too well. Sutter and Lars pitched the script, got interest from a studio, watched that studio go under, and kept moving anyway. Ramble Pictures later came on as a producing partner, and Smart Blonde Films shifted toward making the movie outside the route that had briefly opened for them.

That makes the sketch work feel less like a separate lane and more like the place where the movie has been developing in public. The audience is already there, the tone has been tested, and Lemonade of Love showed that the premise could stretch beyond a quick bit.

Smart Blonde TV+ is two comedy filmmakers using the internet to make the feature feel less like a leap and more like the next scene.

Three Things We Love About Smart Blonde TV+

The relationship comedy can turn: The sketches start in familiar couple territory, then let the mood shift until the joke starts picking up a little threat. That makes Love You to Death feel like an extension of the work, not a genre costume thrown on top of it.

Sutter and Lars bring different instincts: Sutter has the sketch-performance background. Lars has already made a feature. The videos move with internet-comedy speed, but the larger project keeps pulling toward a movie.

The feature is growing in public: Lemonade of Love proved the premise could stretch beyond a quick bit, and the ongoing sketches keep testing the same comic temperature around romance, panic, and suspicion. The feed is not separate from the feature path. It is part of how they are building it.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Shroomates

Instagram: 1K Followers

Who Are Shroomates?

Shroomates is a scripted comedy series about twins trying to build a mushroom startup before the startup eats the family alive.

Ben and Jessie Russo are the siblings at the center of it. Ben thinks he is building the future. Jessie is trying to keep the future from overdrafting. He talks like the company was sent to him by the universe. She talks like she has already checked the bank account.

Brent Pella plays Ben. Pella is a stand-up, a Wild ’N Out alum, and a digital comedian who has spent years around exactly the kind of character Ben is: the wellness guy, the podcast guy, the festival guy, the man who mistakes confidence for a business plan. Ben does not feel like a random founder parody. He feels like one of Pella’s guys finally opened an LLC.

Nikki Howard plays Jessie. Howard is an actor, comedian, model, and digital creator with her own following, and her existing work with Pella on The Audacity gives the sibling dynamic a head start. Jessie is not just there to roll her eyes. She is the person who saw the disaster coming, warned everyone, and still ended up on the cap table.

The official premise is simple: two siblings launch a mushroom company and take themselves far too seriously along the way. The show understands how much comedy already lives inside that sentence. Psychedelic wellness. Startup language. Family labor. Product development. Spiritual branding. A mission statement written before anyone solves operations. None of it needs much exaggeration.

The company behind the series is Schedule35, a real mushroom brand. That is the part that makes Shroomates more than a funny account. Schedule35 did not just hire comedians to make ad sketches. It built a fictional version of its own world and let the comedians attack the exact culture the brand lives inside.

That is a much better move. Most brands want to be loved. Shroomates is willing to look ridiculous. The joke is not anti-mushroom. It is anti-founder bullshit. Anti-wellness cosplay. Anti-people who call every problem a journey because they do not want to admit they forgot to order labels.

The series also has a real creator stack around it. Pella and Howard are not random actors dropped into branded content. They are internet-native comedians with an existing rhythm together. They have made sketches, podcasts, festival-adjacent comedy, and character work that already overlaps with the Shroomates world. Schedule35 is borrowing more than their faces. It is borrowing their comic language.

That is why the casting works. Ben and Jessie do not feel like mascots for a company. They feel like characters who could actually have emerged from this corner of culture. The kind of people who know just enough about psychedelics, branding, and manifestation to become dangerous in a Google Doc.

The smartest piece is the structure. Shroomates gives Schedule35 a repeatable story engine. Every normal business problem becomes an episode. Hiring, naming, product testing, market research, moving home going viral and making chocolate. The brand does not need to interrupt the comedy because the comedy already comes from the business.

Three Things We Love About Shroomates

The brand is willing to be the joke: Most branded entertainment protects the company until the comedy has nowhere to go. Shroomates does the opposite. Schedule35 lets the show make fun of the exact world it lives in: wellness language, founder delusion, product panic, family labor, and people turning a business plan into a spiritual calling.

Ben and Jessie are a real comedy engine: Brent Pella and Nikki Howard give the series more than a premise. Ben is the guy who can turn a bad idea into a mission statement. Jessie is the one who knows it’s a bad idea and still somehow ends up on the cap table. That sibling dynamic gives the show somewhere to go beyond mushroom jokes.

It turns startup problems into episodes: Hiring someone, naming the company, doing market research, making chocolate, moving home, trying to go viral. Every normal business problem becomes a story problem. That is the repeatable engine most branded series never find.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Stef Dag

Instagram: 111K Followers

Youtube: 1.97K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 96.1K Followers

Who Is Stef Dag?

Stef Dag knew how internet shows worked before she became one.

Before Hot & Single, before the tour dates, before the Substack, she was Stephanie D’Agostini, directing digital video at Condé Nast. Vogue’s 73 Questions. Vanity Fair’s Lie Detector. Glamour’s All My Exes. Shows built around timing, discomfort, access, and the half-second when someone realizes they have said too much.

Hot & Single launched on Valentine’s Day 2023. Dag talks to people about dating, sex, loneliness, delusion, and the public embarrassment of wanting someone to want you back. The show could have been cheap. Instead, it has rhythm. The cuts are sharp. The pauses land. The questions know exactly where they are going.

Dag is not just holding the microphone. She is the reason the format works. Sometimes the person gives the funniest answer. Sometimes her face after the answer is funnier. Sometimes she lets the silence sit there long enough to become the joke.

The Condé Nast years are baked into the pacing. 73 Questions taught movement. Lie Detector taught pressure. All My Exes taught romantic discomfort. Hot & Single takes that machinery outside, strips away the celebrity polish, and lets regular people talk themselves into a corner.

But Hot & Single is only one piece of it. Dag is building the same voice across stand-up, writing, touring, and short-form. Her stand-up gives the whole thing a spine. The clips are not floating by themselves. They come from a comedian with an act, a point of view, and a room she is trying to fill.

Her Substack, diary of stef dag, gives the voice more space to spiral. It has the same comic temperature as the clips: anxious, horny, dark, self-aware, embarrassed, then suddenly precise. The live shows give the audience somewhere to go after the feed. The feed keeps bringing new people into the act.

She also has other formats orbiting the main one, including a viral TikTok show where she interviews men about female anatomy. That fits the same comic obsession: dating, confidence, ignorance, gender panic, and the weird performance of knowing what you are talking about when you absolutely do not.

That is the cleaner read on Stef Dag. She is not a comedian with one viral dating show. She is building a comic world around desire, shame, sex, self-delusion, and the little lies people tell when they are trying to sound normal.

The formats change. The voice does not.

Three Things We Love About Stef Dag

She knows where the awkward second lives: The pacing on Hot & Single comes from someone who has spent years cutting interviews, watching people over-explain themselves, and knowing exactly when the silence gets funny.

The stand-up holds it together: The clips work because they come from a comedian with an act, not just a host with a prompt. The live shows, the dating franchise, and the writing all feed the same point of view.

Every format sounds like her: Hot & Single, stand-up, Substack, anatomy interviews, touring. It all comes from the same place: dating culture as embarrassment, performance, and self-exposure.

@stefdag#fyp #herstory #90saesthetic #boyfriendcheck #period

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Russ Tafari

Instagram: 30.2K Followers

Youtube: 287K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 3K Followers

Who Is Russ Tafari?

Russ Tafari makes horror movies you can listen to.

That is his own line, and it is the cleanest description of the format. Tafari is a Las Vegas filmmaker, artist, producer, and horror host building the Russ Tafari Horror Universe across music, shorts, reels, and platform fragments.

The songs are not sitting next to the films. They are inside them. The beat carries the movement. The verses carry the narration. The edit gives the story a body. The VHS texture, deadpan host voice, desert locations, bodies, deals, burials, and late-night-TV framing all belong to the same world.

Too Many Murders plays like a crime scene with a hook. The Burial feels like a desert secret getting dug up one shovel at a time. Vault 13 packages the whole thing like horror programming leaking through an old television. The music gives the pieces rhythm. The film language gives them place.

The Las Vegas setting helps. Tafari is not using the city as a postcard. His Vegas is cheaper, stranger, and lonelier. Desert roads, low light and motel colors. Empty space around bad decisions. It gives the work a recognizable atmosphere without needing to explain much.

The branding is already tight: Filmmaker, artist, horror host. Creator of the Russ Tafari Horror Universe. The same identity keeps showing up across platforms, which matters because the project depends on repetition. The world is not being reinvented every time he posts. It is getting reinforced.

That is what separates the work from normal horrorcore visuals. Tafari can release a song, a short, a character fragment, a fake transmission, a horror-host intro, or a behind-the-scenes clip, and it still feels like part of the same feed from the same universe. The format can move because the world holds.

He has also named the thing early. Most creators wait until the audience gets large enough to justify calling something IP. Tafari is doing it in reverse. The universe is already there. The audience is catching up to the architecture.

That is why he feels worth tracking. Not because horror rap plus short film is a new combination on its own. Because Tafari is treating the combination like a repeatable world, not a one-off aesthetic.

Three Things We Love About Russ Tafari

The music and films are fused: The songs do not feel like soundtrack and the shorts do not feel like promo. They move together.

He understands horror as programming: Vault 13 does not feel like a normal video drop. It feels like something you found on the wrong channel at the wrong hour. That horror-host framing gives the whole universe a broadcast logic.

He is building IP out of atmosphere: The desert, the VHS texture, the deadpan voice, the crime-scene premises, the late-night Vegas feel. None of it is random. Tafari is turning mood into structure.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Martin Walls

Instagram: 12.3K Followers

Youtube: 871K Subscribers

Who Is Martin Walls?

Martin Walls is a Chilean animator who has spent the last few years building one of the most fully realized horror worlds on YouTube.

The Walten Files began in April 2020 and grew out of an earlier Bon’s Burgers idea shaped by Five Nights at Freddy’s. That origin still matters, but the series stopped feeling like fan-adjacent internet horror a long time ago. What Walls built feels closer to a real story world than a format experiment.

The episodes are assembled from company tapes, training reels, old media, employee footage, and other recovered materials tied to Bunny Smiles Incorporated and Bon’s Burgers. Anthony, the uploader attached to the early descriptions, appears as the person gathering and posting what he can find. The series stays disciplined about what it withholds. It never hurries to explain itself.

Walls is also more restrained than a lot of analog horror creators. The videos are not trying to bury the viewer in disturbing images. They move through corporate language, mascot branding, cheerful presentation, and fragments of buried history. The fear comes from contrast. Bon, Banny, Sha, Boozoo, and the rest of the world arrive through flat promotional material and workplace media, which makes the violence underneath it land harder when it surfaces.

There is plenty of lore, but lore is not really the point. What lasts is the invitation to investigate. Bunny Smiles, the Walten family, Felix Kranken, Rosemary, Sophie, the disappearances, the hidden tapes, the half-explained timelines. The audience is not just following plot. They are assembling a universe.

The fan infrastructure around the project is substantial. There is an active wiki, an established merchandise lane, and enough sustained attention that new community signals still register like events. Makeshift plush drops have already been part of the ecosystem, and additional plush plans have reportedly been held until Episodes 5 and 6 are finished.

The delays matter less than they should because the audience is not simply waiting for the next upload. They are still inside the existing material. That is unusual for YouTube-native horror. Most projects in this lane need constant output to stay alive. The Walten Files has held attention through density, mood, and a world that feels larger than the runtime currently available.

Martin Walls did not just make an analog horror series. He built a horror property with enough narrative depth and fan participation to keep expanding between releases. The uploads are only one layer of it.

That is what stands out. The films, the themes, the company, the feature, the process. None of it feels disconnected. It feels like one body of work being built from multiple directions at once.

Three Things We Love About Martin Walls

He understands how much fear lives in format: The company tapes, promotional reels, and recovered-media structure are not decoration. They are the delivery system.

He built something people investigate, not just watch: The series holds because the audience is doing interpretive work, not passively consuming plot.

He made a small body of work feel much larger than it is: That is difficult on YouTube. The Walten Files pulls it off through density, restraint, and a world that extends beyond the uploads themselves.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Bruce Tetsuya

Instagram: 69.4K Followers

Youtube: 16.9K Subscribers

Who Is Bruce Tetsuya?

Bruce Tetsuya makes films about inheritance. Not money. Memory.

His shorts return to the same things again and again: family, grief, lineage, what gets passed down, what gets lost, what survives anyway. That repetition is the shape.

He is a Japanese American filmmaker based in Denver, and the work carries that specificity without forcing it. The films are not interested in announcing themselves. They are interested in holding onto something before it disappears.

He founded House of Kodo with his wife Jade and his best friend Drew. That detail matters. The operation feels small, familial, deliberate. House of Kodo handles commercial work while Tetsuya builds the narrative projects that seem to sit at the center of everything else. The creative life and the practical life are not separated. They are feeding each other.

The short film catalog is already deep. Counter Clockwise, Others Like It Cold, Hunter, Nightjar, Moments Before, In Wake of the Crashing Dawn, Embers, Aria. You can see the body of work taking form in real time. Each project feels like part of the same search.

The short that feels most important right now is Procession. It deals with Japanese American incarceration camps and carries a different kind of weight because of that. It was shot on 16mm, screened on PBS, and played Films of Remembrance in Little Tokyo. The film is not just moving through festivals. It is landing inside the history it is engaging.

The feature debut is coming with The Morning Sea, scheduled for production in summer 2026. That project seems to sit at the center of the next stretch. Around it, there is a larger run of work taking shape too: WITH HEART, PROCESSION, I LOVE YOU AND I’M GOING TO FIX YOU, END OF THINGS. The pace is fast, but it does not feel scattered.

His YouTube channel makes that even clearer. The “Road to My First Feature Film” series documents the build in public. Most filmmakers keep that stretch hidden until there is something finished to unveil. Tetsuya is doing the opposite. He is letting people watch the road before the arrival.

That is what stands out. The films, the themes, the company, the feature, the process. None of it feels disconnected. It feels like one body of work being built from multiple directions at once.

Three Things We Love About Bruce Tetsuya

The work has a real center: These films keep returning to memory, grief, family, and inheritance. Not as branding. As material.

The progression is visible: The catalog already shows growth. You can watch the voice get clearer from project to project.

He is building with intention: The company, the shorts, the feature, the public process. It all points the same way.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: The Jones Brothers

Instagram: 823K Followers

Tik Tok: 1.5 Million Followers

Youtube: 1.9 Million Subscribers

Who Are The Jones Brothers?

Darius and Dominic Jones are brothers from Minnesota making sketch comedy rooted in sports, Black pop culture, and the television shows that shaped them.

Most people probably know them from the football sketches first. The early work is built around NFL archetypes, athlete ego, game-day behavior, and the strange internal logic of sports culture. The comedy lands because it does not feel generic. It feels like it comes from people who actually know that world from the inside. Both brothers played college football, and the sketches carry that kind of specificity.

But the football stuff is not the whole story. It is the audience engine.

The more interesting part is what they have built on top of it. Their YouTube work around Dae Dae and the TV Universe is where the larger ambition starts to show. The premise is pure internet logic: a character realizes life does not work like television and starts spiraling through different fictional worlds. Dora the Explorer, Star Wars, Phineas and Ferb, Pokémon. But what matters is not just the premise. It is that the brothers used it as a recurring narrative object instead of a one-off bit. They stretched the idea across episodes, then pushed it into a full movie.

That is the part worth paying attention to. They are using the tools of the creator economy in a smart way. The shorts keep the audience warm. The channel gives them direct distribution. The characters and worlds create repeatability. Then when they want to make something longer, they do not need to wait for permission. They can just make it and put it in front of the audience they already own.

That makes Adventures of the TV Universe! more important than it might look at first glance. It is not just a long video. It is proof that the brothers are treating YouTube like a place to develop movie-scale storytelling, not just a place to post sketches. A lot of creators say they want to make films. The Jones Brothers are already using creator infrastructure to practice the form.

Their Instagram bio makes the whole thing unusually clear: “Follow us on our journey to make our first feature film”. Usually that kind of line reads like aspiration. Here it reads more like an operating plan. The short-form comedy builds the reach. The longer YouTube narrative work builds the reps. One feeds the other.

That is what makes them worth tracking. Not just that they are funny. Not just that they have scale. It is that they seem to understand exactly what this phase is for.

Three Things We Love About The Jones Brothers

They are using short-form as infrastructure: The sketches are not the end product. They are the repeatable format that keeps attention flowing while the brothers build toward larger narrative work.

They are treating YouTube like a film lab: Dae Dae and the TV Universe gets more interesting once you see it as a narrative prototype that eventually turns into a full movie. That is a much smarter use of platform than just feeding the clip cycle.

The path is already visible: The bio says feature film. The output shows longer-form ambition. The audience is already there. Nothing about the trajectory feels vague.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tejas Hullur

Instagram: 42.6K Followers

Tik Tok: 556.9K Followers

Youtube: 197K Subscribers

Who Is Tejas Hullur?

Tejas Hullur is making the kind of documentaries that are supposed to show up on a streaming platform, then releasing them on YouTube.

His work does not feel like creator content reaching for prestige. It feels like documentary filmmaking that happens to understand the internet.

His breakout project, How to Become More Attractive, Scientifically, could have easily been disposable. The title sounds like algorithm bait. The actual series is much more ambitious than that. Across four episodes, Hullur submits himself to scientific testing, consults researchers, and builds the whole thing toward a finale where he stages a real dating show on camera. It has narrative shape, visual control, and enough patience to let the idea become an actual story.

What makes the series work is Hullur’s position inside it. He is not standing off to the side explaining the material to the viewer. He is the filmmaker, the host, and the test subject at the same time. That gives the project a level of vulnerability most nonfiction creators never reach, because the premise is not just being covered. It is being lived through.

The formal side is strong too. The series is cinematic without feeling self-conscious about it. The edit has rhythm. The score does real work. The episodes feel built as episodes, not just elongated YouTube uploads. You can see the difference immediately. He is thinking in arcs, reveals, escalation, and payoff.

That matters because Hullur is not using YouTube like a dumping ground for ideas that might one day become something bigger. He is already making the bigger thing there. The platform is not the compromise. It is the release strategy.

That is also why his growth feels earned rather than engineered. The clips travel, the numbers move, and the audience expands, but none of it feels reverse-designed from shortform performance. The work is carrying the growth. Not the other way around.

His collaboration with cinematographer Ken Chwatek is part of that. The visual language holds across projects, which gives the work continuity and makes the whole thing feel less like a one-man content operation and more like an actual production model. Not a creator trying to look cinematic. A team with a point of view.

There are already signs the broader industry sees it too. Hullur appeared at Advertising Week New York and Sundance Creator Day in 2025, and Tubefilter has positioned him as someone bridging the creator economy and traditional film. He is operating in a lane that more platforms are going to want: personality-driven nonfiction with the shape and finish of premium documentary storytelling.

That is what makes him worth watching. He is not just making polished YouTube videos. He is building a body of work in public, and doing it in a format Hollywood keeps pretending it has already figured out.

Three Things We Love About Tejas Hullur

He makes proof of concept feel like finished work: A lot of creators make something that suggests what they could do with more money. Hullur’s work already feels like the version after the money.

He understands that YouTube can hold real nonfiction: Not every idea has to be flattened into a fast, disposable creator format. Hullur is betting that longform documentary storytelling can live natively online if the work is good enough. He looks right.

He can move between modes Projects like My Ajja matter because it shows the sensibility is not dependent on a flashy premise. The tone changes, the subject changes, and the work still holds. That is usually the difference between someone with a format and someone with a voice.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Walker Ward

Instagram: 556K Followers

Tik Tok: 235.6K Followers

Who Is Walker Ward?

Walker Ward worked on the sell side of Wall Street for six years. Then he got fired and started making videos about the people he used to work with.

The first character was the Wall Street Intern. A clueless kid in the Hamptons with a little bit of disposable income and no idea how to use it. The video went up in late July 2023, filmed on the LIRR with an empty train car behind him. Within two months he had 20,000 followers. By June 2024 he had a quarter million.

The characters multiplied from there. Palm Beach Dad drives a restored Defender, walks his golden retriever while his wife shops, and drops the GDP of a small country on his dad’s house account at the club. The Get Ready With Me Girl was a parody of beauty influencers that Ward performed with sticky notes as mock acrylic nails. David Goggins shows up when staying hard is the only option. Each one is a compressed character study of a specific American archetype, performed with the commitment of someone who grew up around these people and paid attention.

Ward is from Princeton, New Jersey. He played hockey at Hobart College, studied acting for a summer at NYU, and spent his Wall Street years making internal comedy videos during COVID. The content career really started during the pandemic with a show called Nature Walks with Walker, where he dressed in a captain’s suit and sailed an Amazon raft down a river in his parents’ backyard. The audience at the time was roughly 3,000 friends he had cornered into following him around Manhattan.

The Tribeca UpNext Creators program selected him for the 2025 class. He’s worked with brands like Rhone and Vineyard Vines and has begun partnering on larger campaigns, including a recent Office anniversary activation. He is now represented and moving into more traditional entertainment conversations.

In June 2025, Sharp Entertainment called. Ward had interned there in 2015 and remembered watching the hosts thinking he wanted that job someday. The call was about a dating show where he drives a hot-pink pedicab through New York and tries to match strangers in the backseat. The format works because Ward treats every rider like a character he already understands.

The interesting part is where the ambition actually points. He has said in interviews that movies and television are the goal, and that he is using social media to get there instead of bartending and going on auditions. The character work is not an end in itself. Each sketch feels like a micro-audition for the kind of ensemble comedy where a supporting character shows up for two minutes and steals the episode.

Three Things We Love About Walker Ward

The characters come from the inside: Ward spent six years on Wall Street and grew up around the country club world he satirizes, which is why the details land. Nothing feels guessed.

The Sharp Entertainment loop actually means something: Interning for those producers in 2015 and returning a decade later to host one of their shows shows that the work is translating beyond the feed.

He treats the internet like training, not the destination: The goal is film and television. The daily posting, the characters, the brand work, and the Tribeca selection all feed that.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Public Opinion

Instagram: 77K Followers

Tik Tok: 149.3K Followers

Youtube: 234K Followers

What Is Public Opinion?

Public Opinion is a New York City themed social-native series that started by quizzing strangers about the city and has slowly turned into something closer to a documentary operation with a game show attached.

Jack Coyne, his brother Kieran, and Henry Kornaros founded the company in April 2022. The first format was man-on-the-street trivia about New York history, infrastructure, laws, and politics. Coyne would pay people anywhere from five to a hundred dollars for correct answers. The first video pulled seven million views on TikTok. Before that, Coyne had worked with Casey Neistat, and you can see it in how the project treats the city itself as the subject rather than just the backdrop.

Track Star launched in January 2023 as a second project underneath their umbrella. Participants listen to a song through headphones and try to name the artist, going double or nothing with each round. Kamala Harris, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, and Kings of Leon have all played. The format works as a fast 90-second clip, but it also stretches into hour-long YouTube compilations. A large portion of the audience watches those on connected TV, which says a lot about how the content is being consumed.

The original Public Opinion show didn’t disappear. It changed. The team has moved away from the pure quiz structure and into longer documentary-style investigations on YouTube. One video following the city’s water system took months to produce and ended up connecting with infrastructure workers across the state. Coyne’s mother worked for the MTA for decades, and that perspective runs through the work. The channel treats public infrastructure as something worth understanding, not just something that exists in the background.

What’s interesting is how the two formats now sit next to each other. Track Star moves fast and pulls people in. The documentary work slows everything down and asks for more attention. One is built for immediate recognition. The other only works if you stay with it. Together they start to feel like two sides of the same idea, using the street as the entry point but not stopping there.

You can see the direction it’s heading. The questions are getting heavier. The answers are getting longer. The street is still the starting point, but it’s no longer the whole frame. It feels like a show that’s stretching itself, trying to figure out how much depth it can carry without losing what made it work in the first place.

Three Things We Love About Public Opinion

They turned a street format into a doorway, not a destination: Most man-on-the-street shows stay surface level because the format rewards speed. Public Opinion uses that same setup to pull people in, then asks questions that actually require thought.

They treat the city like something to understand, not react to: The newer episodes don’t chase hot takes or quick opinions. They focus on systems like water, infrastructure, and how the city actually works, using people as the entry point.

You can watch the questions get better over time: The early videos are about recognition. The newer ones are about reasoning. That shift changes the tone of the whole show without changing how it’s made.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Malini Angelica

Instagram: 54K Followers

Tik Tok: 5.9K Followers

Youtube: 379K Followers

Who Is Malini Angelica?

Malini Angelica makes travel documentaries that don’t behave like travel content.

Most of her videos run well past the half-hour mark, and they spend most of that time with the people who live in a place rather than the place itself. A butcher in Naples explaining why his family has sold the same cut of meat for generations. A woman in Beirut talking about what her neighborhood felt like before the explosion. A fisherman in Oman describing how the rhythm of the catch still shapes daily life.

The camera stays longer than most travel channels would allow. Conversations develop instead of getting chopped into quick soundbites, and the pace feels closer to a real visit than a highlight reel.

Angelica appears on screen while her partner handles the cinematography and editing, and that two-person setup shapes the entire channel. The interviews feel natural because there isn’t a large crew surrounding the moment. The footage stays steady and deliberate, and the visual style remains consistent from one episode to the next.

The channel launched in early 2022 with a film about Menorca and has gradually grown into a catalog of long-form travel documentaries. Some episodes attract large audiences soon after release, but many continue picking up viewers months or even years later. That pattern makes the channel behave more like a reference library than a social feed. People researching a destination often discover the videos long after they were uploaded and end up watching the entire episode.

Most of the films run about thirty to thirty-five minutes, which leaves space for interviews, background, and the small details that usually disappear in faster travel formats. Instead of racing through highlights, the structure gives each place time to explain itself.

Her destinations range widely. Italy, Spain, Lebanon, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, Mexico, and the Basque Country all appear in the catalog. What connects them is not geography but approach. Angelica consistently builds each episode around conversations with people who know the place intimately, allowing the culture to emerge through food, work, and daily life.

The work often reminds viewers of the structure made famous by Anthony Bourdain. The tone is different. Angelica is warmer and less confrontational, but the idea is similar: go somewhere, sit down with the people who live there, and let the place explain itself through conversation.

Seen that way, the channel feels less like a travel vlog and more like a small documentary series that happens to live on YouTube.

Three Things We Love About Malini Angelica

The videos reward patience: Most travel creators move quickly from one highlight to the next. Angelica lets conversations unfold and trusts that viewers will stay for the details.

The stories come from the people who live there: Local voices carry the narrative, which keeps the episodes grounded in everyday life rather than tourism spectacle.

A two-person production keeps the work focused: With Angelica interviewing and her partner filming and editing, the channel maintains a consistent voice and visual style across every episode.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: The Ick

Instagram: 582K Followers

Tik Tok: 5.8K Followers

What Is The Ick?

The Ick takes a piece of internet slang and treats it like the premise for a show.

Most people already know the idea. An “ick” is the moment attraction disappears because of something small. A strange habit, a comment that lands wrong, a behavior that suddenly reframes the person sitting across the table.

The internet has been cataloging those moments for years, usually in the form of confession posts or quick videos. What the creators behind The Ick did was turn that behavior into a repeatable series.

The project was created by Alex Berry and produced by American Picture Company, the production company run by filmmaker John Connor Hammond and Ari Cagan. Instead of leaning on commentary or personality, the team approaches the idea like a short scripted comedy.

The engine behind the series is the submission box.

People send in their own stories about the moment a date or partner suddenly became impossible to look at the same way. Thousands of these arrive describing the exact point when attraction collapses. The team reads through them and looks for the ones that have a clear pivot.

Once they find one, the anecdote becomes a starting point rather than the final product. The story is rewritten into a short scene, actors step in, and the situation is staged so the moment of realization lands clearly on camera. If you watch a few episodes in a row you begin to notice the rhythm. The setup feels normal, a detail slips in, and then something happens that flips the entire interaction.

That discipline is what keeps the series from feeling like recycled internet jokes.

The audience supplies the raw experiences, but the production team treats those experiences like material that needs shaping. Performances are directed, the framing stays consistent, and the editing lands the turn rather than letting the moment drift. The result feels closer to a miniature anthology series than a typical social account.

At the same time the show never loses its connection to the community that feeds it. New stories keep arriving, which means the premise refreshes itself constantly. As long as people keep dating and embarrassing themselves in small, memorable ways, the writers’ room never really closes.

The most interesting part is that the format works because of that balance. The internet supplies the chaos. The creators provide the structure. Somewhere between those two things a show emerges.

Three Things We Love About The Ick

The audience is part of the writing process: Viewer submissions are not decoration. They are the raw material that the series is built from.

Every episode hinges on a clean emotional turn: The moment when attraction flips into discomfort gives the format its structure and keeps the stories focused.

The format can keep going without exhausting itself: Because the stories come from real experiences, the premise keeps renewing itself while the visual language of the show stays consistent.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Tony Dabas

Instagram: 454K Followers

Youtube: 13.4K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 185.1K Followers

Who Is Tony Dabas?

Tony Dabas, known as Tony D, is a New York stand-up from Staten Island who has been working rooms for over a decade and quietly built a serious online following along the way.

The social presence did not come first. The stage did. He started grinding New York clubs and open mics in the early 2010s, and that live-room muscle still shows. The characters he plays online do not feel like digital inventions. They feel like people who existed long before the camera was turned on.

One week he is the guy in Arkansas who just won the Powerball. Another week he is every Florida HOA manager who treats grill usage like a criminal offense. He plays a Florida pool cleaner who thinks his rap career is inevitable, a construction guy who negotiates everything including tone, and a wise guy who owns a comedy club and runs it like a personal kingdom. The through line is not ethnicity or gimmick. It is behavior. Each character believes in themselves a little too much, and that certainty drives the comedy.

Tony draws from multiple cultural lanes. Arab-American family dynamics show up often, but so does Italian-American bravado and outer-borough New York energy. He moves between them naturally, not as costume changes but as variations on voices he understands. The dialogue has the rhythm of real argument. People interrupt, people double down and no one concedes.

The stand-up career matters because the internet is not the finish line. The clips create recognition, and that recognition fills clubs in across the country.

He has collaborated with the Scarlotta brothers and other comics operating in the same New York ecosystem, and those crossovers feel like shared territory rather than audience swapping. The tone aligns. The worlds overlap.

Over time what stands out is steadiness. The framing is tight. The production is stripped down. The voice stays intact. He is not reinventing himself for every trend cycle. He is refining a sensibility and letting the audience grow around it.

The internet may introduce you to the character.

The stage is where you see if it lasts..

Three Things We Love About Tony Dabas

The characters feel observed, not manufactured: There’s a difference between writing something for the algorithm and writing something because you’ve actually seen it play out in real life. His work falls in the second category. The arguments stretch in ways that feel familiar. The confidence feels earned. The laughs come from recognition, not from a twist designed to spike engagement.

He’s building a universe, not chasing a bit: Even when the characters change, the world stays consistent. Same sensibility. Same social logic. Same kind of power dynamics in the room. It starts to feel like you’re watching different people from the same neighborhood, not a creator trying on a new costume every week. That consistency is why the audience sticks around, because they’re following the voice as much as any one character.

Commits to the bit: There’s no smirk. No wink to camera. When he’s in a character, he stays there. He doesn’t step outside it to remind you it’s a joke. That commitment is what makes the escalation work. A lot of online comedy collapses because the creator can’t resist undercutting their own bit. Tony doesn’t rush to break it. He lets the character hang themselves with their own logic.

@tonydcomedyWhat it’s like renting in New York🗽🗽 #Renting #Comedy #Apartments #NYC #NewYork

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: NFL Fan Therapy

Instagram: 68.9K Followers

Youtube: 33.4K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 63.6K Followers

What Is NFL Fan Therapy?

NFL Fan Therapy is a sketch series built on a premise that feels almost too simple to work: put NFL fans in therapy and let them explain themselves.

Each episode stages a session between a therapist and a fan of a specific team. The therapist asks measured, reasonable questions. The fan responds with rationalizations, long-held grievances, selective memory, and bursts of misplaced confidence. The format doesn’t change much from episode to episode, which is exactly why it holds up. The room stays the same. The emotional weather shifts with the season.

What becomes clear after a few episodes is that it isn’t really about football strategy or game breakdowns. It’s about identity. It’s about what people attach themselves to and how they justify staying attached when the return on that investment is mostly disappointment. A Patriots fan trying to reconcile the end of a dynasty. A Bills fan framing suffering as meaning. A Cowboys fan whose reference point is permanently anchored in the 1990s. A Browns fan who sounds less angry than resigned. The teams rotate, but the psychological patterns feel stable.

The NFL supplies the inciting incident every week. A blown lead, a draft decision, a quarterback collapse, a miracle comeback. The show doesn’t rush to be first. It takes whatever just happened and treats it as emotional evidence. Instead of reacting to the game, it asks what the game did to the person.

The series was created by Nick “Fitzy” Stevens, a Boston sports radio personality who has spent years inside that ecosystem. Anyone who has listened to Boston sports radio knows the cadence of overreaction and the way fandom blurs into personal narrative. Fitzy didn’t invent that energy; he redirected it into character work. Early episodes were made with his brother and a group of local comedians and actors, shot in batches and built around improvisation. The characters feel less like punchline machines and more like people who have been arguing the same points for years.

What gives the series durability is the restraint. The production is simple. The camera stays on faces. The escalation comes from dialogue, not edits. Because the structure is stable, it can absorb new storylines without reinventing itself. Each season becomes another layer added to the same emotional blueprint.

Seen over time, NFL Fan Therapy reads less like a collection of viral sketches and more like a running archive of fandom under pressure. The league changes constantly. Coaches are fired. Quarterbacks are traded. Windows close. The emotional logic underneath all of it barely moves.

Three Things We Love About NFL Fan Therapy

It turned sports reaction into character work: Most football content online is built on speed. React fast, be loud, move on. NFL Fan Therapy does the opposite. It slows the moment down and asks what the game did to the person. The therapist setting forces self-exposure. The humor comes from watching someone justify their loyalty in real time. That shift from analysis to identity is what gives the series weight beyond the headline.

The format is durable: The room doesn’t change. The structure doesn’t change. The league does and that alignment matters. Every Sunday produces a new inciting incident, and the series absorbs it without reinventing itself. Because the container is stable, the characters can evolve season after season. It feels less like a viral sketch and more like a recurring chamber for confession.

It understands fandom from the inside: Stevens comes out of Boston sports media, which means he knows the cadence of overreaction and the logic of delusion. The characters don’t feel like outside satire. They feel like heightened versions of real conversations. That recognition is what keeps the performances grounded instead of gimmicky.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Rampage (Ethan Yau)

Instagram: 147K Followers

Youtube: 353K Subscribers

Who Is Rampage (Ethan Yau)?

Ethan Yau, known as Rampage, started like most serious poker players, grinding low-stakes cash games in Boston while working a regular job and trying to grow a bankroll the slow way. He just happened to turn the camera on before anything big happened.

When he launched his YouTube channel in 2019, he wasn’t positioning himself as a seasoned pro. He was explaining hands, talking through decisions, and showing sessions as they unfolded. Wins were exciting but contained. Losses were uncomfortable and visible. Viewers weren’t watching a highlight reel. They were watching someone try to move up in real time.

The difference is that he moved up faster than most players would advise.

Rather than staying in small games and protecting his roll at all costs, Rampage kept taking shots. He jumped into bigger tournaments earlier than conservative bankroll management would recommend. That choice created tension naturally. Every vlog carried weight because the buy-ins meant something relative to his bankroll.

In 2022, he won a Wynn Millions event for over six figures, a result that shifted both his career and the channel. The score felt consequential because the audience had seen the build-up. It wasn’t a sudden breakout moment pulled out of nowhere. It was the payoff of a documented climb.

From there, the buy-ins escalated. Five-figure tournaments became normal. High-stakes cash games entered the mix. He appeared in streamed lineups alongside established pros. What didn’t change was the tone. He kept narrating the swings, explaining the risk, and showing both sides of variance.

The real shift, though, was how he brought the audience into the action.

Rampage regularly sells pieces of his tournament entries, allowing viewers to buy a percentage of his action and share in the result. When he runs deep, they profit alongside him. When he busts, they lose alongside him. That dynamic changes the relationship between creator and viewer. The sweat becomes shared rather than symbolic.

He also runs meet-up games and open events where followers can sit in the same field and play. The distance between personality and participant shrinks. Poker, which once felt like a spectator sport during the televised boom of the early 2000s, becomes something communal again.

Poker’s original surge came through television. The Moneymaker era was broadcast-driven and hero-based. Rampage belongs to a different generation, one that grew up understanding distribution as something you build yourself. Instead of waiting for poker media to elevate him, he built audience first. By the time he entered bigger rooms, he brought thousands of viewers with him.

His channel now functions like a season-long arc. There are bankroll targets, tournament series sweats, brutal downswings, and resets after big scores. The volatility is not hidden. It is the narrative engine.

Rampage did not revive poker alone, but he is part of the contingent bringing new energy into the game by making the climb visible again. Not through network cameras, but through uploads. Not through myth, but through math, risk, and repetition.

You don’t just watch to see if he wins. You watch to see how far he’s willing to push it.

Three Things We Love About Rampage

He made the climb the story: The audience didn’t meet him at the top. They watched him grind 1/2 and 2/5, take uncomfortable shots, brick events, and then finally break through. That context makes every big score feel earned.

The high stakes feel personal: A six-figure buy-in on television can feel abstract. On his channel, you understand exactly what that number means relative to the bankroll. The swings land differently because you’ve seen the build-up.

Modernizing poker’s entry point: Instead of television creating heroes from a distance, he built audience through YouTube and social. Meet-up games, streamed appearances, and open tournaments pull fans into the ecosystem rather than keeping them outside of it.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Ryan Izquierdo

Instagram: 220K Followers

Tik Tok: 2.9 Million Followers

Youtube: 1.07 Million Followers

Who Is Ryan Izquierdo?

He’s a Florida man.

Ryan Izquierdo has built a career by turning a personal obsession into a repeatable body of work, and then letting the internet do what it does best: find the people who care.

At the center of everything is fishing, but not as a gimmick or a lifestyle flex. His videos document real days on the water, in Florida and surrounding areas, and they carry the full rhythm of those days. Travel, setup, long stretches where nothing happens, and the sudden moment when everything changes. The camera stays close enough that you feel the waiting, not just the payoff.

What’s easy to miss if you only see a clip or two is that Ryan is running a multi-lane operation. Long-form videos give shape to full outings and adventures. Short clips pull out moments of intensity, surprise, or failure and work as entry points for new viewers. Neither exists on its own. The short work points back to the longer pieces, and the longer pieces give the short clips their weight.

Ryan’s social channels are not built around narration or performance. He doesn’t talk you through every move or frame the day as a show. Much of the storytelling comes from sound, movement, and proximity. Wind hitting the mic. Water slapping the hull. A line tightening unexpectedly. When he speaks, it feels situational rather than presentational, which keeps the work accessible even if you don’t know much about fishing.

That approach has made the content work beyond a niche audience. People who don’t fish still watch because the structure is familiar. You understand pursuit, patience, and payoff even if you’ve never held a rod. Over time, that has helped his audience grow steadily rather than spiking and disappearing.

What ties all of this together is repetition. Ryan does the same thing again and again, in different conditions, and refines the execution over time. He doesn’t chase formats or trends. He shows up, films the day honestly, edits with restraint, and publishes consistently. The growth feels like a byproduct of commitment rather than a strategy.

Seen as a whole, his work isn’t just a collection of fishing clips. It’s a living archive of time spent doing one thing seriously, using social platforms as distribution rather than identity. The audience doesn’t feel like fans of a persona. They feel like people along for the experience.

Three Things We Love About Ryan Izquierdo

He built a whole operation around one obsession: This isn’t a guy dabbling in fishing content. Everything ladders back to being on the water. Long videos, short clips, brand work, travel. It all comes from the same place. That focus is why it holds together and why people stick around.

The short clips don’t cheapen the longer work: A lot of creators flatten their world into highlights. Ryan does the opposite. The quick moments feel like pieces pulled out of real days, not moments engineered just to pop. They make you curious about what came before and what happened after.

Florida isn’t a backdrop, it’s the point: The canals, the heat, the wildlife, the unpredictability. The work feels rooted in a specific place and way of living. You’re not just watching fishing videos, you’re watching someone move through Florida like it’s home.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Carter Amelia Davis

Instagram: 15K Followers

Tik Tok: 47.6K Followers

Youtube: 28.2K Followers

Who Is Carter Amelia Davis?

Carter Amelia Davis is an independent animator based in Minneapolis. She has been making surreal, unnerving shorts for nearly a decade, developing a visual style that is entirely self-taught and shaped through trial, error, and a long run of happy accidents. The work is funny, but it rarely lets you relax. You laugh, then realize you feel a little off, and you’re not sure why.

She did not come to animation through a traditional pipeline. Writing was her first creative focus, and she self-published a novel, Until You Continue To Behave, in 2019. During that process she burned out on words and began moving toward visual art instead. That shift led to rough animated GIFs, which slowly turned into pieces with dialogue and music. Before long she was telling small stories, usually around a minute long, and pushing each one a little further than the last.

Those early works lived online. She posted them to YouTube and social platforms without a release strategy or a festival plan. The work found an audience because it stayed consistent in tone and unmistakably personal. The characters were awkward, the bodies moved in uncomfortable ways, and the jokes lingered instead of resolving cleanly. People came back for the feeling, not the format.

As her confidence grew, the work expanded. The shorts became longer and the stories heavier. That path led to Homemade Gatorade, a nine-minute animated short that plays like a late-night road trip slowly drifting into disillusionment. The film draws from her experience as a trans woman living through the early months of Trump’s second term, but it avoids direct commentary. Instead it follows a character who would rather chase a deeply flawed idea across state lines than admit failure, letting the anxiety sit underneath the comedy.

The way the film was made says a lot. Carter wrote it in January and animated from February through May, completing nearly all of it alone in her room. She works primarily in Photoshop and After Effects, using a collage-based style that leans into limitations instead of fighting them. Voices were recorded remotely over Discord by friends, with her wife voicing the lead character, and the music came from collaborators she already trusted. She works straight through the story, moment by moment, because each beat needs to build on the last.

Homemade Gatorade was the first film she ever submitted to festivals. That decision was driven less by strategy than by response. People reacted strongly to the film online, and she wanted it to have a wider life. It was later selected for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Alongside the films, she has built a direct support system around the work. Patreon funds ongoing projects across different “lump” tiers, and a merch shop sells prints and published material tied to the same visual language. These are practical tools that keep the work moving and independent.

What’s striking is how little the voice changes as the scale shifts. The short social pieces, the longer films, and the experiments shared with supporters all feel cut from the same cloth. Nothing feels bent to fit a platform or smoothed out for reach.

Her path has never really been about choosing between the internet and the festival world. The work lived online first. Festivals amplified it later. The center has stayed the same: making the work she wants to make and putting it where people can find it.

Three Things We Love About Carter Amelia Davis

She learned by making, not waiting: Her progression from rough GIFs to one-minute scenes and eventually to longer films came from consistent practice rather than permission or planning. Each step pushed the work forward without abandoning its core voice.

Constraints are part of the aesthetic: Working alone, using collage, and finding creative shortcuts shaped both the look and rhythm of the animation. The limitations are visible, intentional, and inseparable from the style.

Independence without isolation: Direct audience support through Patreon and merch allows the work to continue on its own terms. That structure keeps the films personal without turning them precious or inaccessible.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: 15 Second Film

Instagram: 195K Followers

Tik Tok: 87.2K Followers

Youtube: 60.6K Followers

What Is 15 Second Film?

15 Second Film is what happens when a cinematographer gets bored of talking about “content” and decides to run an experiment in public.

It was created by Jeb, the guy behind worldofjeb. He works as a camera operator and producer with Fallen Media, and you can feel that background immediately. The shots are steady, sound is clean and the edits do not flail. Even when the subject is a random stranger on a bench, it still looks like someone is actually paying attention.

The setup is simple and very New York. A small crew posts up around the city, often near Washington Square Park, and stop people with a question that is half invitation, half dare: ‘Do you want to direct a short film?’. Most people laugh and then they say yes. Suddenly you are watching someone make real creative choices with zero runway.

That is the whole hook. Fifteen seconds is brutal. You do not have time to explain. You cannot warm up. You either make a clean decision or the moment dies. So people go straight to instinct with a look, gesture, twist or a button. The best ones feel like tiny scenes, not skits, because there is no time for anything else.

Jeb stays off camera and that matters. The series is not built around a host doing bits. The camera is the voice. The people rotate, the tone stays. It is consistent enough that you can watch ten in a row and still feel like you are in the same world.

The reason it works on social is not because it is short. It is because it is tight. The clip starts immediately, ends cleanly, and makes you watch it again to catch the beat you missed. Then you send it to someone. That is how this thing spreads.

It is easy to write it off as a gimmick until you watch a few. Then you realize it is doing something rare. It is showing what taste looks like under pressure, in public, with a camera rolling.

Three Things We Love About 15 Second Film

It turns people into directors, instantly: No prep, no script, no safety net. A stranger is handed the rule and has to decide what the movie is. You are watching taste surface in real time.

The clock replaces explanation: Fifteen seconds does the writing. There is no room to justify choices or overbuild the joke. A clean decision either lands or it does not, and that tension is the whole engine.

The format stays bigger than anyone in it: Faces rotate, voices change, but the series feels consistent. The rule carries the identity, not a host or persona. That is why it stays watchable.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Jon Ryan Sugimoto

Instagram: 96K Followers

Tik Tok: 59.8K Followers

Youtube: 7K Followers

Who Is Jon Ryan Sugimoto?

Jon Ryan Sugimoto makes short films, then cuts them apart on purpose.

During the week, he runs video production at Loop. Nights and weekends, he writes and directs. The result is a body of work that moves back and forth between festival shorts, branded campaigns, and social sketches without losing its voice.

On social, Jon’s work shows up as tight, deadpan scenes that feel like moments pulled from a longer film. Office spirals. Therapy group dynamics. The quiet panic of modern adulthood. They are written to stop a scroll, but they do not feel disposable. Each one has a rule, a turn, and a button. You could lift the scene and drop it into a short film without changing a thing.

That is not an accident. Before the feed, Jon was already making narrative shorts and taking them through festivals. He learned how scenes breathe, where edits land, and how much space a joke needs. When he started posting regularly, he did not switch gears. He adapted the same instincts to vertical.

Social is not a side project for him. It is the front door. Clips test ideas fast. The ones that hit get follow ups. The ones that do not disappear. Scenes that work on phones point people toward the longer films. It is development in public, but disciplined.

That same sensibility is why the crossover works. Jon is already directing branded and studio work, not as a novelty creator, but as a director whose timing and framing translate cleanly. Campaigns for Duolingo, Ridge Wallet, and Character AI. Studio marketing work tied to Paramount and Lionsgate releases. The humor does not change. The delivery just has a bigger brief.

What makes this feel intentional is how the pieces feed each other. Festival films establish taste. Social sketches build audience and pressure-test ideas. Branded work pays the bills and sharpens execution. None of it replaces the other. It compounds.

Three Things We Love About Jon Ryan Sugimoto

He treats the feed like a writers room: Most people post and move on. Jon posts to find out what actually works. If a premise clicks, he worries it like a bone. Follow-up angle, cleaner button, new version. You can watch the material tighten in real time.

The short stuff still feels like film: Even when it is thirty seconds, it has shape. A setup you understand fast, a turn you did not expect, and an ending that lands. It is not “content.” It is a scene.

Jon is using social to move the bigger work: The shorts are not museum pieces. Social is the on-ramp. People discover him through a sketch, then go looking for the longer films, then stay for the next drop. That is the whole system working.

Leave a comment

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Cheyenne Ewulu

Instagram: 38.5K Followers

Tik Tok: 22.1K Followers

Youtube: 17.2K Followers (The Comic Shop)

Who Is Cheyenne Ewulu?

Cheyenne Ewulu turned a comic shop into a sitcom and brought a crowd with her. She writes it, stars in it, and runs it like an indie showrunner. The Comic Shop follows a new owner and her crew trying to keep an independent LA store alive. It feels like the people who live this culture finally got to make the show.

Before that, Ewulu was a geek host and filmmaker inside the world she now writes about. College projects became short documentaries, which led to on-camera work. She learned to shoot, cut, and talk to fans in a way that feels like a conversation, not a broadcast.

First, a small test. Then Cheyenne invited the audience in and let them help pay for a real season. Production updates felt like quick notes from set. She followed with a companion comic to give fans something to hold onto between drops.

The jokes land because the details are lived in: pull lists that go missing, variant debates that get too loud, creator signings that wobble and then fly, the regular pitching their original character. Confessionals actually button. You can tell the beats were written to land on screen, not fixed in the edit.

Production is confident and warm. Clean sound and coverage that knows when to hold on a face and when to cut to the room. The shop looks like a place you could walk into, not a set pretending to be one. Long episodes feel like TV. Short clips carry the hooks that bring new people in.

Cheyenne’s point of view is clear. The camera centers the people who built this culture. Distribution stays simple and personal: full episodes where you can binge, quick scenes and behind-the-scenes clips that show how it gets made. She lets people into the process without breaking the spell.

Three Things We Love About Cheyenne Ewulu

She ships, then levels up: Proof of concept, real audience, season funded, season delivered. Cheyenne kept backers close with plainspoken updates and small wins from set. When the episodes wrapped, she launched a companion comic so the world stayed alive between releases.

Fluency without gatekeeping: Her shop facts are muscle memory: pull-list etiquette, 1:25 variants, Free Comic Book Day chaos, slab versus raw. Ewulu uses those specifics as joke engines, not as walls. Die-hard fans feel seen, casual viewers are never lost.

TV craft with internet timing: Crisp dialogue coverage, confessionals that end on a button, room tone that keeps it real. Clips are framed, captioned, and cropped to travel, then send you back to the full episode. The feed recruits; the season satisfies.

Leave a comment