Chris Waitt

Biography: Agent: Maureen Vincent
Height: 6'
Eyes: Blue Hair: Blonde (natural) Appeared in the National Young theatre from 1990-1992 in the lead of The Suicide. He's also had published Cartoon strips for children and Jokes for greeting cards. He's Illustrated the Childrens book It's a Wild Life. Interview about Furry Avenue What's the story behind Furry Avenue? It's a ten-minute short, intended to be longer than that originally. We made it as a pilot for a series and we were aiming for 30 minutes on mini-DV using a PD 100 as one camera. The other was a Sony, but it wasn't even a 3-chip camera, it was literally off the shelf at Dixons. What got you into making films then? I started making films when I was very young, started on Super 8, but never really edited them very much. Like a lot of people of the generation that crossed from Super 8 to video, I never really got into all the technology of Super 8. When video came along, I got into that a lot more. I shot a fewAgent: Maureen Vincent
Height: 6'
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blonde (natural)
Appeared in the National Young theatre from 1990-1992 in the lead of The Suicide.
He's also had published Cartoon strips for children and Jokes for greeting cards.
He's Illustrated the Childrens book It's a Wild Life.

Interview about Furry Avenue
What's the story behind Furry Avenue?

It's a ten-minute short, intended to be longer than that originally. We made it as a pilot for a series and we were aiming for 30 minutes on mini-DV using a PD 100 as one camera. The other was a Sony, but it wasn't even a 3-chip camera, it was literally off the shelf at Dixons.
What got you into making films then?

I started making films when I was very young, started on Super 8, but never really edited them very much. Like a lot of people of the generation that crossed from Super 8 to video, I never really got into all the technology of Super 8. When video came along, I got into that a lot more. I shot a few early Super 8 pop video type-things. Musicals I was into for while, so I did quite a few musicals with the young Sasha Baron Cohen who is now of Ali G fame, going round Cambridge on a punt, singing like he was some professor singing. I did another where my girlfriend and I were in big bunny suits. We managed to get hold of the ones The Goodies had used and were just leaping around, humping each other in a woodland environment.

So you like to put a lot into your filmmaking – but where did the idea for Furry Avenue come from?

It came out of us having a certain amusement, me and my friends, at certain types of pornography, I suppose. The kind that involves animals and women. We were amused by that, but were not interested in working in that field, if you will. And then we thought, well what if one of these animals was a puppet? It would be sort of surreal and less, well, dodgy I suppose. So once the idea struck home and also thinking about the idea of renegade puppets that had escaped from Sesame Street, going out and then behaving badly in the world, that was something that appealed a great deal. That and following in the tradition of South Park and Beavis and Butthead which obviously had a big impact in the culture and Flat Eric as well, for the Levis advert, which were all fantastically realised, both comically and filmically and they were big influences. Then we set about trying to make some puppets, which we did using old bits, old pairs of jeans, old coats, towels. We just made them ourselves. I had been a cartoonist for some years – I had a cartoon strip in The Times – so I was used to designing and doing design work, so that wasn't as difficult as it might seem. Once we had got over that hurdle it was just a case of coming up with characters and jokes. It was somewhere between animation and writing for real actors, because puppets can actually move in a live way that animation can't.

You were developing a concept, rather than a script?

Absolutely, yes, the script came much, much later. We were just trying to think up jokes for these outrageous or bizarre things that might happen with puppets and humans interacting. We didn't come to the script until later, which actually was a good thing, because it meant there was a strong basis of character. When we came to sit down and write the script it meant we knew the characters very well. That's the method used by people like Pixar, who put a great deal of work into developing the characters before they put them into a story line.
Eventually, we did sit down to write the first half-hour episode of just, well, the wildest things we could think of! It was somewhat like the filmmaking of Russ Myer whom I very much admire, a sort of American iconoclast I suppose. He's often described as the Eisenstein of porn, but his work is not really as pornographic as all that, as much as comic. He has lovely editing and in particular the speed of his work, the sheer adrenaline of it, we were trying to replicate that when we were trying to write the script. When we moved on to filming it, the script was pretty much a compilation of every joke we could think of; the wilder the better.
When it came to film the thing, like a lot of young filmmakers I suppose, we were extremely over-ambitious and only a certain amount of those ideas and gags were actually achieved.
When we came to edit, we realised, to achieve the kind of wildness and pace we were wanting, we would be better off cutting it down to ten minutes, rather than going for a full length 25-minute or half-hour. In that process, we actually developed the style for the film and the whole show. By the time of contracting, it became more like a Scorsese thing, because we were using narration and it had become very fast-paced –which had always been our intention- although when we first looked back at what we had shot we were not quite as fast-paced as we had originally thought, but what we did have was a lot of shocks there.

Tell us about the shoot itself – how did it actually go?

Well, the size of the crew varied from me and my friend Henry, who was the other puppeteer, to six, maybe seven at the most, people. Very limited amount of lighting, often just replacing bulbs with stronger bulbs, to give just additional lighting, but not big lighting set-ups. We did hire a few lights along the way. We shot on two cameras to try and pick up more material. I suppose the thing we tried to take advantage of most with using DV was to be very mobile with the camera, not wanting to stick it on the tripod. We were very eager to have cameras flying in to characters, to use big wide-angle lenses, to really fling the camera around to get the actual energy in the shot. That's something we strove for and I think probably achieved. That's one of the great advantages of DV; you can be so much more mobile with the camera.
That turned out to be quite prophetic in a way, because when we shot the thing on digibeta for the BBC with a budget, not of £7,000 but of £200,000 we actually found that a lot of those shots we wanted to replicate were actually very hard to do, even with a big crew of 30 people, a digibeta and loads of lights. That's when saw there were great advantages when we were using DV that we simply had not realised at the time.
The offer from the BBC – how did that come about from your original 10-minute film?

We took the tape out and showed it around at a few film screening things, like at Edinburgh Mediabase a regular screening called The Blue Room. Having shown it at a few cinemas, we felt the audience response was so positive – we won a couple of audience awards – we just thought, well, we have to do something with this, so we took it to a couple of producers whose names we got through networking. We saw about six different producers; Ali G's producer, the guy who produced Spaced on Channel 4 and the BAFTA award-winning producer we ended up going with, from The League of Gentlemen, Gemma Rogers. Most of the producers were eager to do something with it, but at that point we thought Gemma was most in tune with what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it. At that time we were hoping to take it to Channel 4, but because Gemma had worked for BBC she knew the Head of Comedy John Plowman, so we took it to him and he suggested putting it in for the Green Light Award – a BBC once-a-year scheme where they give out money to new talent, so we went in for that.
We had interviews with a panel of about six people all from the industry and we got our puppets out in the meeting and tried to interest them. Something worked, because they chose us for their 2003 Green Light Award for comedy and we got £200,000 to make it into a half-hour. That was on the basis of a tape and also a script. I forgot to mention that before. We got commissioned by the BBC to produce a script, which we got a few thousand pounds for. So that was all off a 10-minute tape we had shot off some camcorders and my girlfriend's money.
We did have some reservations about whether the BBC was the right home for it, given that it is a quite outrageous product, as it were. Some of those fears were confirmed a bit when we were doing the script and we thought perhaps the BBC were a bit more concerned with good taste than perhaps we were at that point. But it was a huge opportunity and a massive learning curve as well to suddenly be in charge of 35 people when you have always made short films with no more than about 10 friends. There is a lot of equipment and a lot money at stake and every minute has to be accounted for, it's a lot of responsibility.
Did the BBC give you room to grow into that responsibility?

I have to credit them with giving us the opportunity. It is quite rare in TV that people are given the opportunity to direct without the benefit of having been through BBC training courses.
One of the things that was difficult was that sometimes people would pull rank on you and say, no it isn't really done that way and yet it often turned out that the way we had done things before, with camcorders, really was the best way of doing it and the more "professional" way was really quite a long route to achieving the same result.
So how did you get on flying digibeta cameras in a TV studio?

There are real constraints due to size and weight, of doing movement with digibeta cameras. The only way to do some of the moves we wanted was to use tracks, or jibs and things. Having to do these things at the pace that TV wants them means you can't perfect shots to the same degree if you are doing the same shots with the camera hand-held. When we review the material, the shots we did with DV cameras with virtually no extra equipment look really incredibly dynamic. The ones we did in the really expensive version, although they are dynamic, they took a great deal more work to get there and frequently we were not as satisfied with the end results. You might have a shot list for the day that will; require 20-30 set-ups and your first requires you to use a big track, well, the track itself takes 20-25 minutes to lay down, the lighting takes another 15 minutes and by the time you are ready to start rolling, you are already three quarters of an hour into the thing. Then, with camera wobbles on the first take, then the focus puller doesn't quite get it right, then the puppet doesn't quite hit the mark as it were, then your 1st assistant director says "You are now over time on that particular shot, it is time to move on." It is quite a shock at that point. I suppose growing up reading books on Kubrick, you get a false impression of how many takes you can possibly get away with in that kind of environment. I assumed I might get 7-10 takes, but frequently it would be a lot less than that.
So you longed for the extra flexibility of DV at that point?

Definitely, yes. Because it takes so much less time to actually set a shot up, even with lighting, because you are not necessarily choosing to deal with big track and things like that and you can afford to have maybe two or three times as many takes of the camera move if you want. And the visual aesthetic of DV means that you can get away with a bit of roughness in the execution of the shot. But even then, the fact that you can have that many more takes of something means you are much more likely to achieve your ambition on a technical level. Certainly it was great shock to me just how, on a studio TV schedule, just how difficult it was to get ambitious shots. The truth is, most TV is shot unambitiously, so as soon as you start storyboarding for flash camera moves you find it just eats into your time and you spend an hour-and-a-half or two hours on a shot that is going to last two or three seconds on screen.
That might be fine if it's a feature, but TV just doesn't work at that speed. Originally, our producer budgeted for us shooting perhaps 2-3 minutes a day, but that rapidly moved up to between 4 and 5 minutes a day. That's actually quite punishing as it turned out.
Was TV more of a production line than you imagined?

Our producer who dealt with that worked on The League of Gentlemen and she said scheduling like that was quite common in TV comedy and they had obviously achieved quite ambitious shoots on that sort of schedule. But then of course, we had puppets to contend with as well, so we were really half way between animation and live action. Perhaps that should have allowed us to have more time than we had. It's not that we didn't achieve those shots we wanted to, we did get there eventually, it just did not seem like a very efficient way of working.
Overall what did you learn from your TV experience? It is something I feel about quite strongly that if places like the BBC are going to use new directors, then is it worthwhile trying to let them develop their own methods of working. Every hour has to be accounted for financially and any filmmaker who has been used to working in the independent film world would immediately have that shock if they shifted into a highly commercial world, where every decision needs to be justified. What advice would you give to filmmakers following this sort of route into television? You have to be fully aware of the medium you are working in and what its limitations are. In TV studio shoots there wasn't huge opportunity to be doing lots of ambitious shots. There's not much time to change your mind on sets, or just to think of other things, which I think there would be in film. Sometimes the best decisions are going to come at the moment you are shooting. You can be working on a script for two to three months and suddenly you are on the set and you just see the thing there, being played out by actors or by puppets and you just suddenly see the scene in a different way. Really, any creative process needs the ability to be able to adapt to that sort of shift when it happens. I feel quite strongly about those things Woody Allen used to do. He always kept back a bit of his budget to do a shoot after the edit, so that if there's anything he's failed to get, he'll pick it up afterwards. Often, some of his great endings will come about after the edit. Would you say your DV experience showed you the limits of mainstream TV production? Oh, yes, massively. DV is much more of an interactive process. Shooting costs are that much lower, you can afford to go and pick up extra shots, or even go out and shoot an extra scene if it is just not working in the edit. In the mainstream, people inevitably have set ways of working. It's quite difficult if you are a young filmmaker coming in to big professional set-ups to work with people who have been in the industry for 20 years. Our DoP was a man in his fifties and was obviously a very talented and skilled person, but it is obvious that anyone who has worked in an industry for periods like that will have set ways of doing things and they just may not be that open to trying something totally different. Certainly the institutions don't seem to encourage that. What if the BBC just gave you a lump of money and a technical standard rather than locking you in to the studio system – would you have preferred that? Certainly. But more to the point, they could actually have given us half the money! I feel quite strongly that we could have made our programme that way and made it quite a lot cheaper – and better. It's difficult to walk into these big organisations and expect them to adapt to your working methods. They find it almost impossible. That's why we look at organisations like MTV. That's why, ultimately, organisations like that are so fresh and so innovative and so constantly surprising in their output. They are willing to do that, to say to the guys who make Jackass "Here's a load of money, here's eight camcorders go off and make fools of yourselves." The results may not be of appeal to everyone, but there's no denying how fresh some of that filmmaking us. Your BBC film has just aired - as Fur TV? That's right, BBC 2 on a late Saturday night slot. We didn't even know, until the last minute that it was going to be on then. That's another of the characteristics of TV, once your programme has been made it just seems to disappear, until you read about it in the papers. Anyway, it's out now and lots of people are writing about it on the web, saying mostly nice things, which is very gratifying, so we are very pleased about that. What of future plans – how will you follow this one up? With the puppets, depending on whether the BBC take it up as a series or not. It's still in the funding round at the moment. That will obviously make a huge difference to what we do with it. Our ideal home for this remains either MTV or Channel 4. MTV in particular at the moment are great supporters of new talent and innovation in television. They are just incredibly inventive in what they put their money behind. Ultimately I'm interested in cinema and filmmaking. I think something like Jackass is actually shot in an incredibly dynamic way. This is not news to anyone that's a fan of it. People in television and film can be a little superior about things like Jackass, but to me they are incredibly dynamic filmmaking, using DV and the tools anyone can reasonably get access to. In that sense, I'm a big fan of MTV. Music video is what I'm moving into next. I'm shooting one next week with a Welsh band Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Scout Niblett is someone I've been looking to doing a video with and a guy called Boblog. My next video will be with The Evil Tambourines. Of course music video's another great place for innovation and making good use of DV. The other thing I have just finished making and I'm in talks with Channel 4 over, is a documentary I've been making with this guy the naked rambler. He was walking from Lands End to John O'Groats and we were filming when he was arrested in the North of Scotland, so we got an exclusive on that, no one else was filming him at that time. That was really a kind of antidote following filming Fur TV for the BBC. That had been quite a slow process just to get half an hour of programme together. It was very laboured because everything had to be fully story boarded, everything was very decided beforehand and certainly there was not much room to be free or creative on the set. You were really just executing a plan, which in itself can be satisfying, but I found that constricting compared with using DV. That Interview is before The Naked Rambler aired and Fur Tv Had just aired.… Expand