Jason Nash Is Kickstarting the First Vine Feature Film, and He Might Just Pull It Off

What do you get when you mix TV and film stars like Rob Corddry and Busy Philipps with social media celebrities like Glozell and Brittany Furlan? Jason Nash is going to find out. After about a year of building his own social media fame, he’s on a mission to get Vine stars on the big screen.

Nash launched a Kickstarter last week to fund his next project, FML: A Social Media Adventure, with his Vine partner and best friend Brandon Calvillo.

Nash stared creating Vines about a year ago in an effort to promote his movie, Jason Nash Is Married, which came out in June of last year. That film was based on his web series of the same name, and was the first feature released by CC Studios, Comedy Central’s digital arm.

Loosely based on his real life, Nash says the plot for FML emerged from his friendship with Calvillo, who is half his age. “I just thought it was a super good idea for a movie,” he said. “What I was going through, being 40 and having two kids, and what he was going through, being 19 and working at Gamestop, and how we were brought together by this app.”

This will be the first-ever film by and starring Vine stars, whom Nash wrote as exaggerated versions of their real selves. It will also feature many of the same actors who were in Nash’s first movie, such as the previously mentioned Corddry and Philipps.

He hopes that the movie can start a conversation about social media and the role of digital technology in modern life—both good and bad. “You develop feelings towards people that may or may not be true, like, ‘Why isn’t this person texting me back?'” he said. “We all kind of go inward and that’s what the movie is about, going inward and having less human contact.” He says that he sometimes gets trapped in allowing likes on his social media platforms to dictate his self-esteem.

Of course, with some of his Vines getting as many as 80,000 likes and 4 million loops, he’s racking in a lot more social media currency than the average (Internet-savvy) bear. He says the ideas for his hugely popular Vines often come from things he sees around him—or by parodying bad movie tropes, “You know, you’re watching an action film and they always say, ‘You have 24 hours,’ and it’s like, why do they say 24 hours? Why don’t they say 12? Why don’t they say 6?” he said.

Nash started the Kickstarter after being unable to find funding through traditional routes, and hopes that fans will voice their support for the project on the Kickstarter site.

“The thing about Kickstarter is you know right away if you have something good. You know right away if people want to see the film,” he said.

And with $21,707 raised so far of the $200,000 goal, from 223 backers, it’s still up to the fans to decide if they want to see the movie made.

Even if Nash’s project doesn’t end up with the funding it needs, the influence of Vine cannot be denied. The company announced earlier this year that it reached 1.5 billion loops per day of its six-second videos. Brands are taking notice of the platform’s popularity and young user base, hiring Vine stars for Vine-specific advertising and product placement. Last year, Vine star Megan Cignoli partnered with Lowe’s for the “Fix in Six” campaign, using the platform to create bite-sized advice for home improvement.

FML also isn’t the only example of Vine stars expanding beyond the six-second loop. Many are now releasing singles, touring the country, and acting in TV pilots. Nash emphasizes that this amount of talent he saw on Vine was a major motivation for him to write this film.

“I just really thought that this group of people had acting abilities and real comedic chops and they were meant for something larger,” he said. “I see this group of 20-year-olds as the future of comedy.”