April 2013

And so our first post of 2013 arrives… four months into the year. Just to prove that we still exist here are some photos from our latest shoot:

We’d like to thank Stu for once again offering his invaluable assistance and equipment, and for his inexplicable willingness to put his professional reputation on the line just to help us make our disgusting little film. Thanks Stu.

Goodness me it’s been a year since we started this site! Looking back at our first post we are forced to come to the conclusion that we’ve made almost no progress whatsoever. Here’s to another year of procrastination, meagre output and utter obscurity!

For the benefit of those who need a little encouragement before they commit half an hour of their life to watching a sprawling, zero-budget, experimental film made by people they’ve never heard of.

December 2012

Our films weren’t accepted into the London Underground Film Festival but instead of wallowing in self-pity we printed out a load of these and went along anyway:

Exploding Cinema, a London based DIY film collective saw this photo on facebook and said this:

“The new generation of film-makers is not protesting exclusion from Future Shorts, nor even from the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, they’re protesting exclusion from The London Underground Film Festival! 

My question for young film-makers is why do you want to gate-crash these fuddy-duddy parties anyway? Institutions don’t care about you, they’re too busy struggling for their own survival. Go forth and create your own scene!”

We decided to gate-crash the fuddy-duddy party anyway and we saw some great stuff including Savage Witches “a motion picture exploration by David Fawcett and Clara Pais” (of the brilliant One+One Filmmakers Journal), the “celluloid wonders and haunted memories” of Australian filmmaker Tony Lawrence, who combines found footage and original music to create a “dreamlike exploration of memory and film”, and finally an academic discussion about porn, the best part of which was the introductory video which contained a clip of a man being masturbated by a large ape.

When no one was looking we decorated the place with our flyers, adding to the “Piss Factory” art exhibition which consisted largely of post-it-notes featuring such slogans as “twat me”, “punch bowel”, and “I can’t smell you”, along with other things including a picture of Winnie the Pooh saying, “I want to eat your period.”

After completing our guerilla protest we got the hell out of there for fear of angry reprisal from the fuddy-duddys. This fear proved to be unfounded when we got home and found this on the London Underground Film Festival facebook page:

“In honour of Paul Sayers’ and Andy Howlett’s kamikaze advertising campaign / protest this afternoon, we will be holding an impromptu screening of the Deadly Serious Productions film “Zeus” at 4pm today, right before Vigilante Vigilante!”

Of course we weren’t around to witness this monumental moment in underground cinema history but just knowing that it happened was profoundly gratifying.

We didn’t limit our protest to the walls of the festival either. We took to the streets of London and brought beauty to where previously there was naught but sleaze and depravity:

While we were decorating the streets of London we didn’t yet know about the ZEUS screening so we decided to visit the London Film Museum just to ensure that one way or another our place in cinematic history would be secured:

Slough (noun)
1. A muddy or marshy area; a swamp
2. A situation characterised by lack of progress or activity
3. A condition of degradation, despair, or helplessness
4. A state of depression

Made by Andy Howlett and Paul Sayers
With invaluable technical support from Stuart Mills
Music by Kevin McCleod (incompetech.com)

October 2012

Oh dear this really is unacceptable. We’d like to say that from now on we’ll be updating the site three times every month rather than one time every three months, but like Nick Clegg, we shouldn’t make promises we aren’t absolutely certain we can keep.

Our most exciting announcement is that almost a year after recording it (Jesus we really need to get our shit together), our audiobook of The Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is finally available for all you revolting people to gorge yourselves on. We’d like to say a big thank you to Tom Smith and Juicy Webs for hosting it for us. Before you listen to it we should warn you that it’s a reprehensible abomination of mankind, with multiple, graphic descriptions of things like rape, bestiality, torture, paedophilia, necrophilia, klismaphilia (sexual arousal from enemas), urophilia (piss), coprophilia (shit), emetophilia (vomit), and any other -philia that you can imagine. It also contains several scenarios involving a “bull’s dismembered prick”, and perhaps most gruesome of all… some truly appalling French pronunciation. If this sounds like your cup of tea then click here.

Also we’ve begun in earnest the shooting of our film about the mental degradation of an unemployed graduate. We actually had professional equipment and lighting and everything courtesy of Stuart Mills who is actually like… an actual cameraman… who knows what he’s doing. His expertise and knowledge were invaluable and we hope to be working with him again in the future (if we haven’t scared him off already). The working title of the film is Slough of Despond and we’re putting together a short teaser to whet your appetites. It will be less than three months before you see it.

July 2012

Woops we haven’t updated in over two months. To everyone who’s been desperately visiting this page day after day, hoping against hope that we will have added new stuff, we apologise. We’re just horribly disorganised that’s all. In an ideal world we’d be a tight-knit, hyper-organised collective of radical artists, dedicating every waking (and sleeping) hour to creating consciousness-expanding audio-visual wonders, and maximising our global presence in order to bring about a mass awakening of humanity. But this isn’t an ideal world. And we’re basically just a bunch of bums. So you’ll just have to be patient with us.

Our one major (pun intended) development is a new page dedicated to former Prime Minister John Major, featuring the Back to Basics films and a new film called “The John Major Trail” which was written and conceived by Dominic Martin. We hope that this marks the beginning of a new level of creative input from Mr. Martin, as he certainly has a lot to offer.

We also have a new film called “Grow” which was made for the IdeasTap brief with the theme of “Grow”. We were hoping to announce this film in a shower of glory having won the brief, but for some inconceivable reason we didn’t win. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to watch it. It’s rather more minimalist than anything we’ve done before and it features Nick Smith doing his thing.

We’ve begun shooting the film about the misery, alienation, and despair of being an unemployed graduate but progress is likely to be slow because we don’t all live in the same city. The poem film is coming along nicely and should be with you before too long. Oh and we’ve made no progress whatsoever with getting the 120 Days of Sodom audiobook online so all you sadists out there will just have to wait.

Bye.

Made for the IdeasTap Editor’s Brief competition with the theme of “grow”.

“To kick off, our springtime theme is Grow. Growing plants, growing in height, spiritual growth – however you tackle this theme, we want to see your work. Have as much fun as you want with the theme – we’re looking for an original take on it, executed with flair and style. ”

We didn’t win.

April 2012

Hello and welcome to a new realm of audio-visual delight. We’ve actually existed for over a year now but we’ve only just managed to get this website sorted. We hope it was worth the wait. Here you will find all of our films along with information about us and news updates and maybe the odd article or poem. I suppose this is our first news update so here goes: we are currently working on a film in which we will attempt to depict the unrelenting misery, alienation, degradation, and despair of being an unemployed graduate. In no way is this based on our actual experiences. We’re also working on a film based on a sprawling poem/monologue/narration/thing about the university experience and what it all meant. This film has been in production for over two years now. Ridiculous. We’ve also  recorded an audiobook of the Marquis De Sade’s ’120 Days of Sodom’ because astonishingly no one else has done one yet. We’re just working out how to make it available on here but in the meantime here’s a taster. That’s all for now. Bye.

Made as part of the Five Stories High event for the Flatpack Festival 2012. We were given less than a week to throw something together and this was the result.

“With your help we’re aiming to recreate the entire plot of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, through the medium of song, performance, film, illustration and literature (and probably a few others). Each participant will be allocated a slice of the Charles Foster Kane saga (around 6.5% of it), and will then have to work out an interesting way of telling it.”

Our part was the opera house section from 01:21:41 to 01:34:15.

Andy can no longer endure the humdrum of daily existence and he resorts to increasingly desperate measures in his attempts to get lucid and escape into a fantasy dreamworld, much to the chagrin of his long suffering housemate.