Jake – The Movie .com

Making JAKE, Part 4: The Birth of Hybrid

Posted by on 8 April 2010 | 124 Comments

While I started work on a second go at a first bash of JAKE, concurrently, other events were brewing.

Every year, between April and June, the V 48Hours competition rolls around. I got involved with some other South Seas students when I first came to New Zealand in 2004, and through some streak of blind luck, our entry, BURNS AND McCLOUD: STREET SENSE, the story of a cop and a toaster who is also a cop, came in 2nd place over all.

We went on from that success to do ... well, not much of anything, really. A couple fake commercials, and that was about it. And year after year, a roughly similar story would unfurl. How was it that it was so easy to mobilize people to spend money to make a film that they didn't even have control over all the elements of for V48Hours, yet so difficult to organize people outside of that scenario?

Thankfully, there were a few people who listened to my incessant complaining about this scenario and urged me to work towards something. The first was my flatmate, Heath King, who took part first in 2006 and slowly became obsessed with gear for controlling camera motion. Heath is - unlike me - an insanely practical person who can build almost anything. And so we started mumbling about jib arms, dollies, cranes, steadicams.

And then Alastair Tye Samson, who I went to South Seas with in 2004 and had spent much of his subsequent time in Wellington, returned to Auckland. And having invested a lot of his time into a team in Wellington (Hydra Motion Pictures - who had also had success in the V48Hours competition with their short film 16 BULLETS), he was also looking for film making collaborators up here. It was this combination, the Hydra and the Squirrel, that suggested to Al the name Hybrid Motion Pictures.

(This combination is immortalized, in both an endearing and grotesque fashion, in our ID animation, by Lucas Brooking, which can be seen here.)

All this was around the time things were gearing up for the 2008 V48Hours, and so a critical mass was reached for a new team. But we decided, from the start, to have a different approach. First of all, it wasn't just about 48Hours. It was about making films with friends because it's what we love to do. Second of all, it was about treating filmmaking like rock bands treat band practice.

That may seem like a bizarre analogy, but bear with me. A band, by and large, doesn't sit around for a year, then get together one weekend and record an album without practicing. A band practice where nothing happens other than running through a couple songs and jamming on some ideas that don't amount to much isn't intrinsically considered a failure. The sheer act of playing together is reward in and of itself, and experimenting with new ideas is a way of breeding creativity that can manifest itself in different and important ways.

So: Hybrid Sundays were born. Pick up a camera, choose something to experiment with, and go. The first one was to experiment with Heath's brand new jib arm. Whip up a narrative involving a corpse and a gun, and good to go! Following weekends had similarly slight (and bloody) storylines, none of which will win any awards.

Which was not even remotely the point. The point was: we were making short film. Without waiting around for somebody to give us permission or money. And that, in and of itself, is good.