Fifer and Lackey

Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer both hail originally from the Quad Cities, a collection of small towns in Iowa and Illinois that rest on the banks of the Mississippi River. The two initially met in junior high and later struck up a friendship while performing in plays at their high school, which quickly led to many after-school home movies about ghosts and goth kids. Lackey went on to graduate from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a degree in Industrial Design, focusing on special makeup effects. Fifer received his English degree at the University of Illinois, where he co-founded the improv group Spicy Clamato as well as the theater troupe The Penny Dreadful Players, both of which are still thriving.

After relocating to Los Angeles, the two began creating their own films, quickly turning to animation as their best no-budget alternative. They have created a slew of animated shorts for the Web, such as Party From Beyond for AtomFilms, a series of online commercials for Burger King, weekly campaign ads for SeriousAmericans.org during the 2004 election, and the AtomFilms Greenlight Award-winning pulp series, The Investigators. The Investigators was nominated for "Best Internet Video Premiere" at the DVD Premiere Awards, competing against films by Tony Scott and John Woo. This attention allowed Lackey and Fifer to attract talent such as Tim Curry, Chris Sarandon, Traci Lords, Lance Henriksen, Laura Prepon and Debra Wilson to their next animated project, an existential road trip comedy feature called The Chosen One.

The idea behind The Chosen One was for Lackey and Fifer to create a feature film that could be completed with or without Hollywood financing. After raising just enough money to record the actors, the two have completed the film entirely independently, with Lackey directing/animating and Fifer scoring. The Chosen One is currently screening at various film festivals, and will be appearing on DVD in August, 2008.

In the meantime, Fifer and Lackey have been busy with a number of screenwriting projects for film and television. These include a horror film to be produced by Donnie Darko writer/director Richard Kelly and producer Sean McKittrick, a radio comedy-adventure series entitled Mr. Kicks and Dr. Go, a science fiction reality show, and a graphic novel based on their Lovecraft-inspired screenplay, Deadbeats. Speaking of Lovecraft, the two have also recently enjoyed the success of Andrew Leman's silent film adaptation of Lovecraft's best-known work, The Call of Cthulhu, for which Lackey acted as Associate Producer, Fifer provided selected music, and in which both appear as actors. The film has been widely reviewed as the best Lovecraft adaptation to date, and was selected for the feature competition at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Independently, Fifer writes a bi-weekly column called Touch Your Self Help for online criticism magazine The Simon, frequently performs at The Second City studio theater in Los Angeles, and has provided voices for anime films such as Read or Die and Dead Leaves. Lackey, now an animator at Warner Brothers, also recently finished animating sequences for the VH1 television show "I Hate My 30s," acted as Flash supervisor for the animated pilot The Afterlife, and also created animated scenes for the Ernest K. Dickerson film, Never Die Alone.