Early Films Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the story behind these three early short films?

In their final year of school Andrew and Simon did a class in media studies, which was an excuse to make films using a lot of new equipment just acquired. At the time it was considered the best media studies department in Europe, so we were very lucky to have all this equipment and be able to do what we wanted with it. In a group with two other chaps we had to make two films, one on SVHS and one on DV, which were The Derek Turnbull Experience and Lucas’s Big Adventure (AKA The Borad Experience).

In addition to these two we also wrote and starred in another group’s film called Ben Got A Band, which we consider to be an “eXtreme Films Presents” situation – sort of like how Sam Raimi and Quentin Tarantino “present” a lot of random films they have very little to do with, except we actually did a lot in the making of this.

Tell me about the background of The Derek Turnbull Experience, I’m super interested.

Ok... We realised quickly from seeing previous years’ films that a group of teens who couldn’t act and had never made a film before could not pull of a serious drama, or a film about drugs. They were all laughably bad. If you’re making a cheap film with non-actors and you can be funny then make a comedy, as if something is funny people will overlook all the shortfalls.

Derek was largely filmed in a large Sainsburys one evening in 2001, amazingly it seems if you write a letter asking permission to film in a supermarket they’ll let you. Unfortunately it wasn’t actually filmed in an Iceland supermarket. Andrew somewhat reluctantly agreed to be Derek because nobody else was up for it, the first of a string of major roles Andrew did because nobody else wanted to, while Simon was behind the camera. The film was directed by the whole group and edited by Daniel, regardless of what the credits may say.

The humour is really awkward... Like “The Office”, was that the inspiration?

No, not at all. Derek was filmed in 2001 – the same year as The Office and I think we actually pre-date it being broadcast. If it had been none of us had seen it, as unsurprisingly when you’re 17 and have your whole life ahead of you the last thing you want to watch is a TV show about people with dead end office jobs. To this day Andrew has still not seen an entire episode of The Office, a fact he is rather proud of.

The similarity comes from the fact that Derek Turnbull was part inspired by a character played by Steve Coogan in The Day Today (1992), where he is a hapless swimming pool security guard. The Office was also heavily inspired by a segment in The Day Today which is a spoof fly on the wall documentary about life in an office.

We both drew inspiration from/ripped off the same source at the same time.

Tell me about Lucas’s Big Adventure AKA The Borad Experience, I’m really-really interested!

Umm... Well we had to make a second film, this time on DV, and were stuck for what to do to follow up Derek Turnbull which had turned out rather well. We saw a rough cut of another group’s first film which had attempted to be an edgy drama but turned out like a very badly made anti-drink propaganda film eerily similar to one we had been forced to watch a few years earlier (like an “After School Special” for North American readers).

In this film the main character goes to a party, tries to hit on a girl, fails. His best mate however succeeds in picking her up, so the protagonist gets drunk and drives home but on the way accidentally runs over the girl he was hitting on. Classic stuff. The fact the film was only half-edited and the acting was shocking, with scripts frequently being seen in people’s hands, made it all the more incredible.

Our first plan was to just record us from behind sitting in a theatre watching their film, silhouettes against the bottom of the screen, taking the piss out of it ala MST3K. This however was shot down by our teacher for being disgusting lazy and quite mean. Instead we decided to remake their film with a slight twist.

All the characters in the film had the name of the actor who had played them in the original, except the film’s protagonist who was furious at hearing we were essentially making a 15 minute character assassination of him and forced us to change his name, which we did - to “Borad” and named the film “The Borad Experience”. He was also not best pleased about this and we were forced to change the name again during editing, it became “Lucas’s Big Adventure”. Star Wars fans will know Episode 2 Attack Of The Clones had the working title of “Jar Jar’s Big Adventure” (which ironically might have been a better film.) non-Star Wars fans will not know this, and should be safe in the knowledge they are significantly cooler for it.

Somewhat surprisingly everyone who had been in the original film liked this retelling, and nobody tried to run us down in the street.

Fascinating stuff! Now tell me about Ben Got A Band!

I’m not buying this, but OK. We had finished our two films so had completed our coursework for the year. Unfortunately the other group in our class we were friends with couldn’t come up with a second idea for a film, and were told if they didn’t get a film done they’d fail the course, and if they failed the course some of them might not get into university. Pretty harsh stuff. So one lunch they asking Simon and Andrew to write a script for them based around a battle of the band concert that was happening the next night.

The script was written over a 40 minute lunch break, and a message was slipped into the next day’s daily notices that Simon and Garfunkel had been added to the battle of the band’s roster. It was filmed very quickly the next day in a couple of rooms with some recorded crowd footage of that night.

We had planned to take to the stage after the final act for some bad Throbbing Gristle inspired noise and nonsense, but people organising the show caught wind of this and they shut the power down to the stage after the final act. This concert scene was thus filmed in a classroom, which is why this scene looks a bit timid. It’s probably just as well as we all wrecked by the end of the night on cheap rum.

Are the films online the same as the ones on an old VHS tape I saw?

Almost. When we went back to reclaim the master tapes so we could put them onto DVD a few years later, we found that the Derek SVHS master had been lost. A copy of the final film without music, voice overs and title cards was there though, so we transferred that and collected all the old DV tapes we could find for The Borad Experience and Ben Got A Band.

Towards the end of Street Punks being filmed and edited Andrew decided to try “restore” Derek and the other films to stick on DVD, as the VHS copy was becoming very sad. Derek had some noise removed, and a lot of dead black frames and static between cuts. New voiceover for the narrator was done by Simon, and Andrew re-did the Vanilla Ice voiceover (an enjoyable revisit), and the live version of Ice Ice Baby from the seminal album “Extremely Live” was tracked down as the music track was also gone (also an enjoyable revisit). Some audio also had to be recorded off the old VHS, cleaned up and inserted back in as rerecording it just didn’t sound right at all. One very short line was also removed, as it was improvised and not written by us and we never liked it. It looks and sounds a lot better now than it ever did.

Ben Got A Band and The Borad Experience were in a much more complete state, a few dead frames removed, audio tweaks, and title cards were all that was needed. The gun effect from Street Punks was inserted into The Borad Experience. All the title cards were done by Joseph who played Red Dragon in Street Punks and also did all of our title cards and logos for ‘Punks.

In short they are 99% the same as the old VHS but look and sound a lot clearer, which isn’t always a good thing...

What about the legendary lost early Extreme Films shorts I’ve heard so much about?

Back in the Summer of 1999 eXtreme Films was formed after Simon and Andrew were horrified at the shambolic effort of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Disturbed that George Lucas would go on to make a horrific sequel to Return Of The Jedi they decided to beat him to the punch and make 3 sequel films using Simon’s Dad’s camcorder and a load of old Star Wars and A-Team figures. The results were hysterical - if you were a 15 year old boy in 1999. 

These three early efforts remain in the vaults, titled:

Star Wars Episode VII: The Chamber Of Farts
Star Wars Episode VII Part II: Hacking Back Into The ‘80s
Star Wars Episode VII Part III: Murdock The Buttock Warlock

The master tapes still exist and if there’s enough interest they could get digitally transferred and made available. It’s been a long time since they’ve been viewed but I imagine they are pretty shameful and whatever the opposite of sexy is.