UW-Madison alumni Sam Elhindi, Zac Krause, and Will Reiland enjoyed a spring homecoming to their alma mater after their short film, Juice Cleanse, earned a spot in the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival. The trio works together as Saint Monday, a sketch comedy group that has been putting out short comedy clips for the last several years.
The idea for Juice Cleanse came to Krause after seeing a social media post from someone saying they were doing a juice cleanse with store-bought, ultra processed orange juice rather than the typical organic ingredients like kale, carrots, spinach, or ginger. The contrast inspired him to bring the idea to Elhindi and Reiland.
“The great thing about working with Sam and Will is you can bring a kernel of something you think is funny to them, and it’s immediately heightened and exaggerated to be even more funny,” Krause said. “We started to think about how these idiotic sketch characters that we generally work with would do this, and we decided they would do a juice cleanse with Hawaiian Punch.”
When the three learned their film was selected to be a part of the Wisconsin Film Festival, they knew they wanted to come back to Madison to participate in the festivities. “It’s been a very humbling and very sweet homecoming for us. We haven’t been back in this way since we graduated in 2015,” Reiland said.
In addition to attending the Film Festival, Reiland wanted to see if there were opportunities to share the group’s experience as filmmakers and climbing the professional industry ladder with current Communication Arts students. After reaching out to Professor Eric Hoyt, who taught Reiland’s section of CA155: Intro to Digital Media Production when he was a student, Erik Gunneson and Craig Erpelding were tagged onto the email and both jumped at the opportunity to have the group speak with their production classes.
Krause advises current students to make things that are deniable. “Make 100 things–they might be bad but just make something. Down the line, you might make something ‘undeniable,’ but you can’t really make that until you make a bunch of things that are very deniable first,” he said. This philosophy guides the three in their creative process for sketch comedy as they throw out tons of ideas and see which ones stick.
The three creators are preparing to release numerous new sketches in the coming months. You can check out their work on their Saint Monday YouTube channel, and on Instagram and TikTok.