David William James Elliott's award-winning short film I Forgot to Unsubscribe from a Stock Footage Service will debut on YouTube on July 24, 2026, on the newly launched channel of RIOUGA, a startup production company co-founded by Elliott and Juan Sebastian Carcosa. The film, which has screened at festivals worldwide including Cannes, London, and New York, draws from Elliott's own experience of being stuck with an unwanted stock footage subscription. It follows a filmmaker who devises increasingly desperate schemes to reclaim his money using the footage, ultimately rediscovering his creative drive.
The film has garnered dozens of awards, including Best Stunt and Best Female Director, despite being directed by a man and composed entirely of stock footage. It also earned recognition for its voice work, writing, editing, and a recreation of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive using stock clips. This eclectic award haul has inspired Elliott's upcoming project exposing scam film festivals, though he remains tight-lipped about details.
Elliott, an MIT and Stanford graduate with training at Second City, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Steppenwolf, previously turned down an opportunity to write for Saturday Night Live in 2012 to build sustainable farms in developing nations. He credits the subscription mishap with sparking his return to the arts, leading to five other film projects and a poetry book released in the past six months. “I was happy making one-off appearances on murder mystery shows and helping with camera work,” Elliott said. “But a combination of being stuck with that subscription and receiving a free waiver from the Milwaukee Film Festival inspired this project. That, in turn, inspired a variety of other projects, including exposés on the art industry and the film festival vanity press machine.”
One such project, Hypernormalization 2: Revenge of the Titans, began as a gag in I Forgot before becoming a 60-minute documentary that won several awards, including “Most Likely to Be Cancelled” from a dubious festival with no digital footprint. RIOUGA, described by its founders as “PBS meets Adult Swim, for burnouts, by burnouts,” is developing three interview series alongside a collection of short films and documentaries scheduled for release throughout the summer and fall. The network aims to explore fine art and niche subcultures as a counterpoint to AI and corporate polish, inspiring people to pick up old hobbies and return to their dreams.
