Award-winning director David William James Elliott's cult short film, I Forgot to Unsubscribe from a Stock Footage Service, will debut on YouTube on July 24, 2026, via the newly launched RIOUGA channel. The film, which has garnered dozens of awards during its festival run, explores the all-too-common scenario of being trapped in an unwanted subscription and the creative journey that follows.
The short film follows a filmmaker who, after forgetting to cancel a free trial, devises increasingly desperate schemes to recover his money using the stock footage. What begins as a mission to recoup a fee transforms into a deeper exploration of creativity and identity. The piece blends memoir, metatextual documentary, and existential horror, resonating with aging millennials stuck in the service industry.
During its festival run, the film accumulated numerous accolades, including awards for Best Stunt and Best Female Director—despite being directed by a man and composed entirely of stock footage. It also received recognition for voice work, writing, editing, and a loving homage to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, recreated with stock clips. This bizarre selection of awards has inspired a forthcoming project exposing scam film festivals, though Elliott remains tight-lipped until filming concludes.
Elliott, an MIT and Stanford graduate with training from Second City, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Steppenwolf, and The Annoyance, as well as a BJJ Black Belt, famously 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 reigniting his artistic career, 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 from his Milwaukee workshop. “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.”
Indeed, Hypernormalization 2: Revenge of the Titans began as a throwaway gag in I Forgot before evolving into a 60-minute documentary. Despite legal hurdles, it won several awards, including “Most Likely to Be Cancelled” from a dubious festival with no digital footprint.
The film's YouTube debut coincides with the launch of RIOUGA (Royal Institute of Objectively Universally Good Art), a startup production company founded by Juan Sebastian Carcosa and David Elliott. Described as “PBS meets Adult Swim, for burnouts, by burnouts,” the network plans to explore fine art, niche subcultures, and surreal human creativity as a counterpoint to AI and corporate polish. RIOUGA is currently developing three interview series and a collection of short films and documentaries for release throughout summer and fall 2026.
