Naïveté: The Key Ingredient To The Birth Of An Artist

Welcome to another edition of the Fred & Dan Blog! Our mission with Fred&Dan Productions and this blog has always been to make people think in ways they’ve never done before - to spark creativity and facilitate conversation in unconventional ways. A place where you can open up your email and have a bit of creativity to take with you into your day or week!  

This is our series where we interview fellow entrepreneurs and creatives to discover their secret sauce on being a success in their field! Today we are so excited to bring you an interview with Meg Kelly, an actress, writer, and creator of the award winning webseries Jennifer & Chicken. Meg is a fellow executive producer on the upcoming series Big Oops, which we are still raising funds for! We are almost 80% funded but need bout $4,500 by next week to reach our goal. You can donate here! 

Enjoy this great convo we had with our long time friend Meg in podcast form which we highly recommend or you can read a condensed version of the interview below. 

MEG: If I had known what it was gonna do to my life and like my bank account, I maybe would've chosen a different path. I think maybe naivete is a key ingredient in the birth of an artist because you have to have some reason to jump out of the plane and probably just not knowing is fine I think. 

MEG KELLY: My name's Meg Kelly. I'm an actor, writer, filmmaker, and I'm living in LA and producing my own films. 

For context for our blog readers; Janette and Gio are two of my best friends. And we've been on this creative journey together for a long time. I think 11 years. We started school at LMU 11 years ago.

FRED&DAN: Ew. Yikes. Yikes. 

MEG: It's been quite the journey. I think being a creative in your twenties, it's not easy but I feel like we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel a little bit. 

We've all been working on our own stuff for years, and then this past year we decided to produce a web series. So that was the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur and really bringing a story to life and creating something out of nothing. It was a great experience. Very, very challenging, very hard, but super rewarding and I feel like a great stepping stone.

I feel like it has served the purpose, like it was meant to when I set out to make something.

F&D: Okay. Let's go all the way to the beginning and talk about the inception of Jennifer & Chicken, the web series and how this all came to be. 

MEG: It was a very windy road, a long and winding road to get to the web series

The story started with the characters. In 2020, I was living with Janette and there was not a lot going on because of the pandemic. So we started creating comedy TikTok sketches, and we created a sketch called Toxic Roommate because I had this idea of wanting to play just like the worst roommate ever.

Someone really loud and obnoxious and hard to live with and just crazy. And then we had the opposite of the toxic roommate who I called Chicken. 

And then I wanted to write something a little more long form. I was on the phone with Giovana, I think it was like that summer 2021, and I was like, oh, I wanna make a web series. I'm interested in writing about our lifestyles as creatives in their twenties. And Gio was like, you should write about Jennifer and Chicken.

And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's a good idea. And then I started and a week later I had the first draft. It was just kind of like a brain blast moment inspired by Gio. Janette helped with the TikTok, and then Gio inspired the web series. So you guys were integral roles in the creation of this project too.

F&D: It was fun hearing you go on that journey and the inception to doing it. I mean, watching from TikTok, 'cause I was up here in the Bay Area, it was always just so fun to see how that progressed. So one of the questions we wanted to ask you is what gave you the courage or the inspiration to pursue this and create an entire web series?

MEG: I'd had enough independent production experience that I knew it was possible to make. I wrote all of the scenes in locations I knew we had access to. 

I don't know if there was a lot of courage involved. I think it was more naivete and I was just like, of course we can make it. I'll just fly out a couple weekends to LA and we'll shoot some stuff and it won't be that intricate. Then after we produced the first episode and we were in crowdfunding and I was working on pre-production, that's when I realized what I had gotten myself into. I truly did not realize how much work it was gonna be. 

I didn't know what it was gonna turn into. And I think that definitely overwhelmed me and freaked me out a little bit. But we had already raised money, so there was no going back. People had already given us money, so we have to make it. People are donating hundreds of dollars to help us do this.

I think what it was, it was like once the train had left the station, it was like well, you're on the ride now. Like  you just have to see it through. But I was very scared. 

F&D: I love that though. We talk a lot about the naivete kind of aspect. I was talking to somebody recently and I was like, I look back and I'm like, did we really produce our first film when we were like 23? Like, I didn't even know which way was up when I was 23. And it is such naivete to think, yeah, I'm just gonna produce an entire movie with a set of 40 people barely out of college. Like you gotta love that naivete though. 

MEG: I think it’s so important. If I had known what it was gonna do to my life and like my bank account, I maybe would've chosen a different path.I think maybe naivete is a key ingredient in the birth of an artist because you have to have some reason to jump out of the plane and probably like just not knowing is fine I think. 

F&D: It's a form of courage, right? 

MEG: Yeah. But I also think it's like once you do it the first time, it's not as hard the second time 'cause you know what you're in for. And so you can get it in your head a little bit easier. You're like, oh, I know how long this is gonna take, and I know how much money we're gonna need for that, and it’s still quite a lot of work, but it can be done and you have more faith in the process after you do it a first time. 

F&D: How does creativity factor into what you do as an actor, a producer, a writer, all the things?

MEG: I think, especially with filmmaking, because it is such an expensive art form and like a business as well as an art, it's difficult because so much of producing is work. It's emails and tasks and location scouting and like, that's like 90% of what happens to put a film on its feet, which can be creative too. 

But I think the major moments for me as a creative are the writing process and the performing and the editing. Editing is very creative for me too. Sometimes you get sucked into the production aspect and it's a little bit frustrating because all you wanna do is the creative part, but you have to do a lot of work to become a “creator.”

For me, creativity has a lot to do with trust and just trying stuff and not being afraid to fail. 

F&D: I think something that made Jennifer and Chicken so successful is the fact that the team that you built around it were people that we've all known for years and years and years, like since college or, in terms of Max, our other producer, who I met right outside of college. We all knew each other so well. There was so much trust in that creative world and on the set that I think it really shows in the web series in the chemistry of everyone and how everyone was willing to try new things and improvise. And now we have the band back together!

We're doing another web series called Big Oops, which readers of the blog will know. We've, we've talked about it a lot. And this is from one of the producers and director of photography from Jennifer & Chicken Tyler. So Meg, we'd love to know what your role is in this new series.

MEG: Yeah. It's exciting, it's cool.  I'm so grateful that Tyler has stepped up to show run. Because I know I do not have it in me to do that for another year or two. So I'm excited to be a supporting player this time. I'm executive producing and directing one episode.

I don't know what other creative teams look like, but ours, since we have this like rapport and we've worked together for years now in our writing group… We just hop on Zoom meetings and Tyler will delegate tasks and, we're kind of just like a support for Tyler. 

I think another key thing to highlight is Tyler left his full-time job to create this series. So he's taking six months off to create Big Oops. And I did the same thing for Jennifer & Chicken. I took six months off.

I had saved up. I was living at home with my parents. I had saved up a bunch of money. And then in that time that I made this series, I spent all the money I had saved– all my savings on rent and living so I could create this. And so like huge props to Tyler for taking a risk to create his own thing.

And I know from my experience, it's been rewarding. Like we've made some great connections and I do feel like it was a huge learning experience. I think that's important to know that like, it's not just like, “oh, it's so fun they're making a film together.” It's a full-time job and a huge investment and I give major kudos to Tyler for stepping up and leading us through our next project. 

F&D: What lessons are you gonna take from Jennifer and Chicken and bring into your role as executive producer for Big Oops?

MEG: I think it's a lot of little lessons that build together, just in our experience. Having done it once, I think we know a little bit more of what to expect and things like, you need to set money aside for this or it would be wise to just find a location that's already dressed. We don't have time to dress all these things. We don't have the money to buy all the stuff to dress it. So I think it's, a lot of it is just like little things that we'll bring with us. 

F&D: Do you have any advice for people who are trying to do something outside of their comfort zone? Like how you went from being an actress to being a producer? 

MEG: Having fun with it is key. I think the material is really important. Don't write something, don't produce something that you're not interested in. Don't produce something because you think it's a good idea and other people are gonna wanna buy it. It's so much work to create a film, so you better be interested in what you're making.

More than that, it should be personal to the creator. It is good to just try stuff and throw it at the wall, but if you're going to commit to making a film and you're going to commit to raising money and spending other people's money on a piece of art, like make it meaningful to you and a subject that you're excited to explore. I think that would be my main piece of advice.