I share an office in New York City with my business partner Ariel Schulman and his younger brother Nev, a photographer. Our threshold for considering something interesting enough to film is very, very low. You can buy an SD card for $10 at Radioshack. And you can always delete the footage if it’s no good, even though we never do. When Nev started to correspond with an 8-year-old kid who reached out to him on the internet, Ariel pulled out his camera instinctively.
We're part of a loose association of like-minded filmmakers in New York -- the Neistat Brothers, the Safdie Brothers, Lena Dunham and Red Bucket Films -- most of whom rent studios in a pair of buildings on lower Broadway. If we're part of a movement it might be called the Diane Fink Film School, after our shared landlord.
We film ourselves all the time. I’ve been filming since high school, carrying a mini-DV camera in my backpack, always that annoying guy. Why are you filming this? Since the advent of much smaller digital HD cameras, self-documentation has become even more of a compulsion in our circle of friends. The Neistat Brothers built an HBO show around it and Red Bucket Films made an hour-long DVD compilation of their pocket camera musings, called “Buttons."
Our videos would occasionally end up part of a short film, or on YouTube, but mostly just get filed away on a hard-drive, unwatched. We use pocket cameras like writers use notebooks -- to capture the spontaneous and unexpected, to remember our lives.
The story of "Catfish" began when Nev received the message from Abby. The young ballet fan and painter in MIchigan reached out to him on his practically dormant MySpace account, asking permission to paint from his photographs. 
Flattered and charmed, he agreed. His message quickly received a reply from the little girl’s mother, letting him know not to worry -- her daughter was a precocious artist but she monitored her internet use very carefully.
Before long Abby and Nev were email pen pals and would regularly snail-mail paintings and photographs back and forth. Nev encouraged Abby to work on details like faces and hands. Nev was inspired; he confessed that every time he took a photo he had begun considering whether it would make a good painting. Soon, local galleries were taking interest in Abby’s work and collectors were beginning to buy her paintings for thousands of dollars.
Abby even shared her earnings with Nev. She won a contest with a painting of one of his photographs and her mother, Angela, insisted on splitting the winnings with him.
Through Abby, Nev was introduced to a online community of artists, family and friends who all lived in remote Upper Peninsula Michigan. He met her babysitter Joelle, a student at a local college; Tim Hobbins, an aspiring art dealer who encouraged Nev to sell his collection off; Abby’s older sister Megan, a beautiful veterinary student; and a dozen others connected to the family in various ways.
