Face to Face with... The Theory

Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp are serious about filmmaking. So much so that they travelled the world together for years seeking an education on directing techniques and camera methods before finally returning home to the UK to hook up as a team. Now actively shooting under the alias The Theory, the two recently signed to Nexus Productions off the back of their latest short mixed media film, Speed of Light (above).

The entertaining piece presents a high-speed police chase, all filmed with a phone and light projectors and follows in the footsteps of their successful viral Address is Approximate that achieved success on Vimeo towards the end of last year. Here they tell us about their early days as businessmen, the reaction to Address’ success and how they constructed ‘the world’s smallest all-action police chase’.

Tell us a bit about The Theory and how you guys got together…

We met at a live events/corporate production company way back in 2000. I was right out of university and Simon had come from a production job at Channel 4. We actually started at the production company the same week and, being newbies, stuck together and struck up a friendship. After a couple of years we teamed up with another couple of guys from the production company and decided we would attempt to do it better, so we left to form our own.

It was a great time - we travelled the world filming all kinds of corporate films and honing our skills as cameramen. This was really when Simon and I found we clicked on projects; we worked well together and enjoyed it. But there was a huge problem - the company was a beast with four heads, all with different ideas on how to run the business. So after seven years Simon and I decided it was time to move on. We sold our shares, moved into an office in the old Airfix factory in Wandsworth and finally became The Theory.

Tell us about the value of your experiences and things you learnt in terms of filmmaking by travelling the world. Was it a weird feeling coming back to the UK having been away for so long?

Ha - in our bio it says we spent years travelling - like we were finding ourselves in some monastery in Nepal or something! I think it was a bit more metaphorical - while we did travel a lot we really spent ten years exploring life. We travelled, learnt about business, learnt about craft and learnt more about doing what we adore - making all kinds of films.

When we finally decided to team up and become The Theory it was (and still is) incredibly liberating. In our old company we got to the point where we had to have a high throughput of projects, like a conveyer belt, to make sure the money kept on coming in for staff salaries, overheads etc. Now it's just Simon and I, doing what we love and trying to do it as well as we possibly can.

Why did you decide to create a tiny police chase?

We became fascinated with micro projectors and began wondering if there was some way we could use them in a new and interesting way. We also love projection mapping but noticed there haven't been many 'micro projection mapping' projects, so we put two and two together. When we have a kernel of an idea it's kind of like an itch - it doesn't go away until it's scratched! As with Address is Approximate this was a personal project so we had to fit it in around our other paid projects and because of this we decided to film in our office building again. We've now moved to Wimbledon Studios but the old office was a cool 1950's industrial building in Wandsworth so it looks great on camera, too.

The film is a high octane, two-minute piece and uses the projectors in a variety of cool ways. We understood that to work well the chase must be at least as good as a normal movie car chase so we created a simple three-act narrative then threw everything at it!

Tell us a bit more about how it was all put together…

The production process broke down into a number of phases. First we did a bunch of tests to check whether the concept actually worked, then we filmed the elements (that would be projected) against green screen using a green screen treadmill. We bought a scale model Ford GT in a model shop but the police car and helicopter were a lot harder to find. We finally found the cop car model on eBay - it already had flashing lights so this meant we didn't have to add them in post. Then we literally drove the model cars on the treadmill, filming the various angles we needed. The Ford GT model is twice the size of the cop car so we had to film them separately then comp them together in post.

Then we took all the footage and cut it to the music in Avid, then went into After Effects to change the backgrounds to pure black, as well as adding explosions, the helicopter rotor blades and a bit more movement etc.

Then we loaded all the clips onto an iPod, hooked up the projectors and filmed the projections while carefully matching the angles – that part of the process was definitely the hardest. We spent a long time getting this right and ended up having to distort the projected images so they read correctly on camera (like those adverts painted on football pitches - if you look from any other angle they look totally distorted). We also built a number of wheeled rigs to ensure the camera and projector would stay aligned during the shots. Unfortunately these rigs had to be rebuilt for each different angle, so the whole process was extremely painstaking.

Finally we cut the film, did a few reshoots, mixed the sound then graded the sequence. The whole process took nine months, as we had to squeeze it in around everything else.

Tell us about your short Address is Approximate. Did its success come as a surprise?

We made Address is Approximate as another personal project last year, and it came about in a similar way to Speed of Light. We'd become fascinated with Google Street View and couldn't understand why anyone hadn't tried to animate it before, so this was our starting point. We'd also been playing around with long exposure time lapse techniques and realised if you used long exposures on a stop motion animation you could achieve a unique look and feel with very little lighting. So we combined these vague thoughts and came up with Address. We'd never done stop motion animation before so it was a challenge, but it worked for the story so we just went for it.

We finished it but it stayed on my laptop for a few months until November 2011 when Simon finally decided we should put it on Vimeo. We knew it was okay but it was such a massive surprise when it started to go viral. It was a crazy few weeks and 100 per cent unexpected - every time a new comment was added on Vimeo an email pinged up on my Blackberry and after a day I just had to turn it off - it was driving us mad - literally every minute PING…PING…PING. But it was truly amazing and to think it touched so many people is mind blowing.

How would you describe your style and where do you see your work going having signed to Nexus?

We like to think we're technical innovators fused with quirky storytellers. We want to see things we haven't seen before and we want to turn everyday things into creative tools by realising their full potential. I guess we're hackers at heart. Working with Nexus is extremely exciting and we're looking forward to developing our style over a wide range of projects. If it fascinates us, makes us itch, we'll scratch it!