Early interest in filmmaking Dane Willard Boedigheimer was born in
Itasca County, Minnesota, and Julie (née Barsness) Boedigheimer. Boedigheimer has a younger brother, Lucas. Boedigheimer was raised in
Harwood, North Dakota, in the
Fargo–Moorhead area, where she frequently made home videos as a teen. For these videos, Boedigheimer began using her parents' 8mm video camera that she got for
Christmas at the age of 12; "I was spending entire days making short videos with my younger brother. It all just blossomed from there. I remember sitting in my room for hours editing my videos with two VCRs. It was painstaking, but I loved it. There was something magical about making stories come to life right in front of my eyes, no matter how crappy those stories were!" This would later inspire Boedigheimer to work as a camera operator for local TV stations. Boedigheimer attended
West Fargo High School where she graduated in 1997.
Education at MSUM During her college years, Boedigheimer studied filmmaking at
Minnesota State University Moorhead where she met Spencer Grove as an undergraduate. She was a major in speech communications with an emphasis in film studies, which she has said to be a preparation for the creation of
Annoying Orange; "The program (at MSUM) was very small when I was there, and you had to make things work with a small budget. I think that experience actually kind of helped." with Boedigheimer earning $700 a week. On
Valentine's Day 2005, Boedigheimer founded the company Gagfilms, which slowly built a core of fans. The original video was planned to be titled
The Annoying Apple, but when Boedigheimer started animating the video, she figured it would be easier to put features on an orange than an apple and make it more visible.
Annoying Orange was initially never intended to be a series. However, as the video became popular, many viewers requested more videos, and after the 4th episode, Boedigheimer decided to make it a full-time series. Following the success of the series, a channel dedicated to
Annoying Orange was created under the name "realannoyingorange" on January 31, 2010. The success of the series would also receive the attention of Fargo advertising agency H2M, who, in 2006, created its own "Talking Orange", which is the spokesman for an ad campaign for the North Dakota Department of Transportation. Both of the two characters were two anthropomorphic oranges with ties to the Fargo-Moorhead area. Despite only slightly resembling the "Talking Orange",
Annoying Orange was looked into by H2M's attorneys due to intellectual property issues. Boedigheimer stated that she had not seen the "Talking Orange" videos prior to the disagreement, also believing that the characters were not very similar. New episodes of
Annoying Orange were initially released on a weekly, currently bi-weekly basis, with a few exceptions. The episodes are released every Friday on realannoyingorange's YouTube channel, now the official
Annoying Orange channel.
Other works Besides
Annoying Orange, Boedigheimer, along with friends, created other shows. One of the shows created on her channel was called
Thunder McWylde. It is a cartoon series that premiered on October 10, 2013, and it revolves around Thunder McWylde, a retired street fighter who is trying to live a normal life, but who is too strong for his own good. Along with Bob Jennings, Boedigheimer created another cartoon series on
Annoying Orange YouTube channel called
The Misfortune of Being Ned. Premiering on October 9, 2013, and ending on April 23, 2014, the show's plot revolves around Ned (voiced by Steve Zaragoza), a cheerful elementary school kid who encounters a lot of bad situations. Boedigheimer has done two animated videos for Rebecca Parham, who animated the videos and runs the YouTube channel Let Me Explain Studios. The first one was for her song "Stuck in an Emo Band", and the second one was for a story called "Stuck in a Bank". ==Awards and reception==