We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ethan Bouchard a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ethan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

There I was, a 9 year old in Memphis Tennessee playing Nintendo 64, completely surrounded by large quantities of Lego and Dragon Ball Z action figures. There he was, a 10 year old at the front door asking my mom if he could mow our lawn for money. She said yes and told me to offer him something to drink, which I did, and after talking for a bit he invited me over to his parents house to play.
Now, I had pictured us playing some sort of video game or building with Lego or fighting with toy guns and action figures, but instead he ended up showing me a 15 minute cartoon that he made, then some music that he had recorded. I was so heckin’ jealous, haha, AND impressed, so I put myself in his shoes and started making videos, which lead to me acting in stage plays, followed by writing and performing my own music. Still haven’t made a cartoon though, even though I got very close once with a few artists local to me.

I know that everything someone does stems from inspiration they got from another, and this is exactly that same story. I just want to give the inspiration that I stemmed from it’s proper dues. Thanks for inspiring me to be a doer of things and a lover of stuff, Alex.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

SLICEFURY – YOUTUBE CHANNEL:

When I was in high school, whenever I got home and finished homework I HAD to leave the house, it was just part of life at that point for myself and my 5 brothers and sisters. To fill the time, I asked for a video camera and started making “Jackass” videos with my friends. One of them included throwing a fake baseball bat at my friends head, followed by him chomping down on a blood capsule and pretending he’s concussed.
Wild.

Cut to a few years later, YouTube goes online and mine starts popping off. Keep in mind that there were almost no users at thi time, so going viral was very easy back then. That inspired me to take every film class my high school had to offer, and upon graduating moved up to Michigan to attend The Motion Picture Institute, where I learned from people that have actually worked on big-time movies like Spiderman 2 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

After that I moved to Texas where I continued to make comedy sketches on my YouTube channel, and still going to this day with my partner-in-goof buddy Bret Crow, sound master Anthony Fuentes, and camera dude Larry Hill, who show up every Wednesday to film another one.

STRONG WORK! – BAND:

“Strong Work!” is my band that’s been around for 9 years now. We play Funk-Punk-Rap-Rock music around the DFW in Texas. We were originally called something else but figured out soon through others that it was the name of a biker gang, so we needed a name change fast! One drunken night, our good friend listening to our practice responded by saying “Strong Work!”, which stuck out to me and we quickly renamed ourselves.

This decade-old project of mine has been so much fun, and everyone that I’ve worked with has been so talented. Whenever you start a project like this, there’s several opportunities to meet others that share the same passion. If you can connect with that, it becomes a very powerful way of moving forward. “It’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know, and THEN it’s what you know.”

That being said, here’s a short story; A few days after posting our existence on social media, we were offered our first gig at The Abbey Underground in Denton, Texas with Puddin’ Taine.
A few months later, we get contacted by Puddin’ Taine that they can’t make Homegrown 024 in Houston, Texas featuring ‘Green Jello’, and offered us their spot. We accepted and played our first festival, WITH GREEN FRIGGIN’ JELLO! Well, the next morning we were hit with an emergency alert for flash flooding, so we packed up and zoomed out of Houston as fast as we could. This was the crazy floods on April of 2016 that stranded people on top of their cars and homes, an killed many.
We barely made it out of there in time to not sink with them, but we put the pedal to the metal and made it out safely.
Thanks Puddin’ Taine! Haha. The highs and lows were all worth it.

NOT NORMAL PRODUCTIONS – EVENT AND PRODUCTION COMPANY:

Movie nights, trivia, video game tourneys, variety shows, band showcases, videography and editing, and much more. WE DO IT ALL! About 4 years ago, we used to have the largest gathering of Smash Bros. players in Denton for our Not Normal Smash Tourney, and after a small hiatus, we’re about to start doing it all again.

Another project from this side of me that I want to bring back as well is “The Not Normal Variety Show”, which is a show I put on that has no limits to its performers, so if you want to show off that juggling act, sign on up! We have room for it. Even one of the writers from Bojack Horseman showed up from out of state to do a comedy set! That moment made me proud as well as showed me that all that promotion work pays off!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes, there is the want and a need to have fun and collaborate with others and make a good time happen, whether it be make a silly video for people to laugh at, perform a crazy catchy song with all our might, or host an event that brings like-minded people together to talk and enjoy time together.

Along my journeys of being a creative, I’ve realized so many other creatives are alone in their craft, even though they are surrounded by people that love the same things as them. That’s why I do what I do. I want them to meet, talk, collaborate, and through all of that, help to move eachother forward TOGETHER.

Again, it’s not WHAT you know that moves you forward, it’s WHO you know, and THEN it’s what you know.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

This is going to sound cheesy, but I’d have to say anyways that it’s the people I’ve met along the way that helped me maintain and grow my craft without ever getting bored of it or burnt out. Because of the positive, strong-working people that I’ve cultivated into my personal circle, It’s hard to NOT continue having this much fun with them all and making memories that’ll stick with us forever.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: SliceFury
• Facebook: SliceFury
• Youtube: SliceFury
• Soundcloud: SliceFury
• Other: www.youtube.com/strongworkbandwww.soundcloud.com/strong-work

  www.tiktok.com/slicefury

  www.facebook.com/notnormalproductions