Aaron Toronto, a SDSU alum, hosted a release party in Downtown Brookings for his new EP “Illumination,” and a screening for the first episode of his sitcom, titled “Pizza Dude” on March 7. 

People in the Brookings community and SDSU students and faculty gathered at the Old Fire Hall on 4th Street where the unique event was held, free of charge. It was sponsored by Ekern Plumbing and Heating. 

Toronto said that he didn’t intend for the two shows to be premiered the same night at first. 

“I’ve held premiere screenings of other films I’ve done so I wouldn’t say I’m a stranger to it,” Toronto said. “But to do both a music release and screening in the same night was definitely a new thing for me, so that was fun for me to do them together.” 

During the first part of the show, Toronto performed his EP with band members who were also alumni and one current student from SDSU. 

“When we hit the first chord, I just felt the music flow, and I was like this is gonna be great,” Toronto said. “I could tell the audience was into it…I felt like there was an immediate connection.” 

Joseph Thvedt, an audience member from the Brookings community, said he enjoyed the concert. 

“It was good,” Thvedt said. “It’s just fun to come to an event like this and see someone local that makes new music. It’s exciting to see that.” 

Toronto said he was in a band called DSM in the early 2000s and held a release party for it but decided to focus on filmmaking for years, being a part of many projects. Now, he’s working on his solo music career along with his filmmaking. 

After the music was performed, Toronto put on his pilot episode for “Pizza Dude,” which was projected onto the wall of the Old Fire Hall. 

The sitcom, described by Toronto as a “combination of ‘The Office’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ follows a pizza delivery man named Chester, who gets into interesting situations as he delivers pizza and films a documentary about it. The episode was filmed in Brookings and features George’s Pizza and a few fraternity houses on campus. 

“There were laughs when I didn’t expect laughs,” Toronto said. “I was like ‘That wasn’t meant to be funny,’ but people just roared at it, so I was like ‘Great.’ It’s always interesting to see what people like in the show.” 

Toronto and various alumni and students were seen in the sitcom, including George Tsakiridis, a philosophy and religion professor at SDSU, who starred as Chester’s boss, George. 

 Tsakiridis and Toronto have been involved in many films together and were both producing ‘Pizza Dude’ for a few years before its release.

“It’s been really great having a collaborator and friend in town like Aaron because in Brookings, South Dakota, for the size of [the] town, we have a decent amount of film going on but it’s not LA or Atlanta,” Tsakiridis said. “This was a really fun project, and I think it does have some promise, but we’ll see where it goes.”  

Once the screening was done, Toronto invited cast members up to take a bow and answer questions from the audience about the episode and talk about the process of filming. 

One audience member asked about more episodes and the future of ‘Pizza Dude.’ Toronto says he has summaries of more episodes but is in the process of pitching the sitcom to a few streaming services.

“What we’re going to do now is my manager is going to pitch it around,” Toronto said. “We have a few contacts with Netflix and Amazon that we’re going to pitch it to and see if they’ll pick it up.” 

He isn’t getting his hopes up though, due to the challenges artists face in breaking into the industry. Despite this, Toronto plans to keep filming ‘Pizza Dude’ and creating other projects. 

“Show-biz is a fickle mistress if you know what I mean,” Toronto said. “You just never know what some executive will like or not like…But I’m hoping with the proof of concept…that people will go ‘Wow, that’s funny, we want to pick that up and really develop it into a series.’ So, that would be an up high-in-the-sky hope for the series, and if not I’m going to just write more episodes and keep making them.” 

Along with the sitcom, Toronto is planning to play his music at more places in Brookings and Sioux Falls and is developing more film projects for the future.

“I intend to put out more songs and more albums and hopefully do more movies,” Toronto said. “I actually have kind of a horror film that I’m going to try and do here this summer.” 

If you want to check out Toronto’s music, you can look up “Aaron Toronto” on any music service and his website, www.aarontoronto.com, for his music and film projects.