Junior Jacob Salzberg mutters lines under his breath. He repeats “This is ridiculous; please call this off!” quietly over and over.

“Am I still terrified?” Salzberg asks a few seconds later.

“You’re pissed off,” producer John Goodwin says.

In a slightly run-down student house on Patterson Street, eight students find themselves shoved haphazardly into one room with lights, cameras and sound equipment. Someone claps their hands loudly, marking the beginning of a scene — this is as much to quiet everyone down as it is to tell the editor, who will peer over hours of footage once the filming wraps up, where the take officially starts. Salzberg falls into character.

In front of a hastily hung green felt background, Salzberg (now the character “Matt”) frantically tells the camera how he fears for his life now that he knows one of his roommates, “Chris,” is a murderer — a fact revealed after the last episode of the mock reality TV show “Random Roommates.” The cameras stop after two takes, which are deemed successful, and the entire congregation heads upstairs to shoot the next scene.

This is how a group of Duck TV students spent their Friday night.

Duck TV is the University of Oregon’s student-run television network, home of news segments, sports broadcasting and many fictitious shows pitched from the minds of some of UO’s most creative students. Two shows which aired this term are “The Lab,” a suspense mystery-thriller revolving around the limits of human evolution and “Random Roommates,” wherein four radically different male students are shoved into one house under the guise of having their shenanigans filmed by a reality TV crew.

Junior Conor Armor pitched the faux-reality show after the success of his comedy show last term, “SuperDan and the Green Wombat,” which he co-wrote with Salzberg. After “SuperDan” won Duck TV’s award for audience favorite, Armor decided to try writing a solo project.

“I wanted to try and improve my comedy writing,” Armor said. “I thought, ‘What’s a ridiculous concept that people can relate to, aimed at a college audience? Everyone can relate to having awkward, weird roommates. What’s the most ridiculous combination of people you can have? A home-schooled kid who’s never seen a beer bottle in his life and a drug dealer.’”

“Random Roommates” embraces the absurd while confronting the uncomfortable. The characters partake in acid trips, puns, failed flirting and acts of revenge. Episode two, which heavily featured fake feces, was even deemed too inappropriate to air on Duck TV and instead found its home on YouTube.

“The Lab” is a different creature altogether. Writer and creator Blair Lindberg has been creating movies since he first borrowed his dad’s camcorder at 8 years old. He says he is rarely caught without his notebook, where he scribbles ideas for TV and film productions in a language only he can interpret fully. In his notebook resides his first inklings about the four-episode science fiction drama, which was adapted from its original feature-film version.

“I was thinking, ‘Why haven’t we been evolving lately?’” Lindberg said. “(The human race) has been static in terms of growing — what would happen if we did start all of a sudden evolving again? What would we become?” Lindberg had been working on the concept for “The Lab” for three years before it premiered on Duck TV.

“I’m so passionate about telling a story because, at the end of the day, that’s really all we have that we can call our own — stories,” Lindberg said. “Film is one of the great mediums that really exploits that.”

Not only is Lindberg the creative mind behind the show, he also portrays one of its main characters, Dr. Zahn — although Lindberg admits that he much prefers the creativity behind the camera as opposed to being in front of it.

While creative writing behind the camera is the first step of the process, screenwriters like Lindberg and Armor require actors to bring their work to life.

One such actor is freshman Lexi Sloan, who plays a main character on “The Lab” and was also in “SuperDan.” She has been a theater actress since she was 8 years old, working in three shows a year. Growing up in Southern California, she became familiar with the Hollywood culture.

After stumbling upon a poster for Duck TV auditions in early fall, Sloan found herself in front of a panel of upperclassmen. She was hastily given a scene from one of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films to act out.

“You walk in and there’s anywhere between five to seven people sitting behind a big table,” Sloan recalled. “They’re all juniors and seniors; no one looked like a kid from my class. It’s very fast-paced and intimidating.” Despite her nerves, Sloan landed a part. “Once you’re in, I found it to be fun,” she said.

“Auditions” in the Duck TV sense, are for anyone, from those seeking to be producers, actors, sound technicians or editors. The show may start in the notebook of someone like Lindberg or Armor and may continue through the talents of actors like Sloan and Salzberg, but the final product is far from complete.

That’s where people like Rebecca Felcyn come in.

What many consider the most arduous task of film and television production, Felcyn sees as a calling. Like Sloan, Felcyn, a freshman, also discovered Duck TV through a poster and was able to land a position exactly where she wanted to be: in front of a computer, editing.

“I enjoy sitting down and being frustrated; it’s weird how in love I am with it,” Felcyn said of editing. “So many things have to go into making ten people look like a house party.” She edits the episodes for “Random Roommates” and was also the editor for “SuperDan.”

Felcyn, who does not attend the shows’ shootings, is often given hours of footage without really knowing what she’s going to see when she plays them. The producers will often apologize to her through the camera for messed-up shots, yelling “We’re sorry, Rebecca!” from off-camera.

“It’s all about bringing the producers’ vision to life,” Felcyn said. The editing process, from when she gets the randomly labeled video files to when the episode is fit for screening, takes anywhere from six to eight hours, sometimes more. After that, one week’s episode is finally complete, screened and put up on the Duck TV website. Each Duck TV fiction show gets four episodes from start to finish, with each installment being approximately eight minutes long.

“It is nice to write something and then immediately see it produced and get a sense of how what you put down on a piece of paper can be envisioned by other people,” Armor said.