Two is company David: Well, we both are pretty lucky that we get to work with other creatives in a creative capacity. Trevor: Right. It’s not only a good idea to be surrounded by creative people, but to be around people who are at the top of their game, and really, really putting in the effort to get the work out there. I think that the idea of working with someone that you can bounce ideas with, back and forth – that you can create on our own and then come together again and then bounce ideas again is a really progressive way to work. David: Yeah, we have a similar foundation, so it’s just natural for us to kind of do it together. It’s hard out there you know – we got rid of one of our own competitors by coming together, plus we double the amount of work and kick ass twice as much.

The one place you go to stimulate ideas? We’re always looking for the next place. A restaurant, a café, a coffee shop we’ve never been to before. But the bar we’ve never been to is our favorite place. Drinking in uncharted territory is the best thought-process generator we know of.

View War & Julius’s pitch Large QuickTime Small QuickTime

A matter of scale Trevor: Trying to define what a big idea means is really looking at what’s important to us as people, and for us it comes down to like smaller things, ideas that kind of really attack the human experience, however simple. And it is that kind of thinking that got us started. David: It’s those little observed moments, like the one that we picked. The first thing that we wanted to do was to have a story, and you know we hoped it would be an interesting story – and maybe even a funny story. But yeah, that was the first goal for us, to come up with an observation that would eventually become a complete story and use the library to really punch it up, to blow it out, to make it super cool.

Primal scream Once the basic idea was there, we dove headfirst into the library. From there it was smooth sailing – everything seemed to make a lot of sense and fall right into place. It was unbelievably entertaining to sift through the footage, dreaming about what kinds of “chaos” would bring the story to life. Hours of pure entertainment value – this is the only place we know of where you can see an orangutan in a three-piece suit reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe while screaming at his stock broker on the cell phone.

Walk in the park Trevor: Part of the problem with making a film using stock imagery is that you don’t want it to look or feel like stock imagery, so we decided we wanted to use stock footage in the typical way while also trying to integrate it in ways we haven’t seen it done before. We wanted to try and solve production issues with stock footage and we needed a parking meter, but the problem is Los Angeles has transferred all their meters over to – David: 21st century technology. Trevor: – digital meters. Well, we found the right location and the meter was digital and instead of renting a prop, and excavating the digital meter from the street and having someone do all that work, we decided to take a Getty Images shot of a manual meter and transpose it onto our meter. David: That was a cool discovery for us ’cause we were on the phone, looking around with each other trying to discover a place where we could actually find an old-school parking meter, and we thought, “What are we going to do?” and just started to search in the library. I was like, “Oh my god, there’s one right there.” I remember calling him up, and was like, “Dude, can we get that in there digitally and make it work?” Trevor: And it worked.

Environmental engineering Trevor: I also feel that there is a creative use for the footage that I’d like to employ, where you can kind of create your own world with the footage without anybody knowing. For example, you have a window and out the window we can transpose any kind of stock footage. It’s like layering and texture and being able to bring a piece to another level without actually having to create that world in reality.

Three films that have inspired your work? We have favorite filmmakers… Stanley Kubrick (The Father) The Coen Brothers (The Sons) Alfred Hitchcock (The Holy Ghost)

Crossing the line David: The bottom line is that it is time to push the boundaries. I think that the audience and viewers – tastemakers – are much more sophisticated than the powers that be give them credit for, and I think it’s time to challenge what has been set as the norm, whether it be virals or long-format commercials as entertainment...all that stuff is completely relevant and I’m sure there are going to be new ideas out there too. And we hope to be part of it.

David and Trevor attend The Next Big Idea premiere in Los Angeles. 71193524, Getty Images

If The Next Big Idea were a plate of food? Hmmmm… Oscar Meyer Cracker Stacker Lunchables. So fun. So delicious. And in every lunchbox in America.