Earlier in the week we celebrated the two-year anniversary of Stuck Up Films! It’s been a fun ride so far, and we are trying to keep up the momentum into the new year with back-to-back projects! But this is also a time of looking at the past, right to the very beginning. In this blog post, you’ll be hearing about some of the origins of Stuck Up Films!
The Revolutionary Joke
In early January 2022, I approached Tom Millington and Ben Vause about starring in a short film together. Their chemistry seemed like a great fit for the screen (and they were also very likely to say yes). That’s the film we now know as The Revolutionary Joke (2022). I had originally wrote it to be produced during my time at Sheffield Hallam University, but soon believed that my existing portfolio was too light to even be accepted into university! So I quickly set my sights on producing the film during my final year at College as an independent project. While it may have aged poorly, and be a very rough start, it still holds a special place to us as the first project that me and Tom had worked on together. We had known each other for barely a couple of months and there were certain… creative tensions… which can be seen in the bloopers video, but it was a learning experience for us all!
Expanding Our Portfolio
At the exact same time, Tom had also realised that he needed to expand his own video portfolio and asked me and Ben to form a team of filmmakers who would work on shoots with him. We wanted a focus on client work, but as film students, there was a thought at the back of our heads saying that we didn’t want to abandon making films. We vowed to also make films in this partnership and distribute them on our social media. It was only when we were on set filming The Revolutionary Joke that we realised that this had become the first Stuck Up Films project!
Our early projects outside of College consisted of our work with local businesses. We started with the Cakehouse, which we detailed the process of in our previous blog post. The recognition from this advert soon led us to film for the Crepe and Waffehouse in Trentham soon after. Eventually, our ambition outweighed our equipment at the time, with a third advert for a local business failing to be made. It was a dark environment and our previous cameras and lack of lighting equipment meant that we could not produce a video which we would have been happy with. Fortunately, as we were just expanding our portfolio at the time, we were able to move on to other projects. With our current capabilities and equipment, we would now very easily do something at this scale or greater.
The Name
Early in the process, we noticed that this venture needed a name. We looked up some famous examples of film studios. Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers… all of them are excellent names but unfortunately taken. We then looked at production companies, such as Dwayne Johnson’s ‘Seven Bucks’, which was named after the amount of money that he had before joining the world of wrestling. We realised that the name needed to be something personal and meaningful to us. This is the part of the story where we commit acts of vandalism.
Everyone knows the ‘sticky men’ toys, right? These colourful little sticky figures will latch onto any surface, especially ceilings. You can even see one of them in our logo! In our A Level Media Studies classroom, me, Tom, and Ben (among others) watched as more and more of these sticky men ended up on the high ceiling above our table. No one was ever found guilty but there were definitely a limited number of suspects. It became a daily check-in to see which survived, which had fallen down, which had left an ominous coloured stain behind…
As these guys were stuck up on the ceiling, I suggested the name Stuck Up Films. A simple Google Search proved that there was no real previous usage of the term, so we took it as our own, and I guess it stuck?
The Stuck Up Film Festival
In the Summer following our graduation from College, we were left with a collection of our coursework. There were three short films and two miniature advertising campaigns. I wanted to model the release of these like a film festival, or a televised ceremony like the Oscars, so we edited them together into the Stuck Up Film Festival. It was a fun way to draw a line under this era of our career and celebrate our successes.
Alex Wilson was the star of the adverts and short film directed by Ben, and I was able to edit them together in a way that you could see his characters as being the same. This famous fashion model ends the final advert with him walking into his house, surrounded by paparazzi and surveillance and then continues to be watched and stalked inside the house during the short film. At the end of the festival, we teased the release of Spirits Leaving (2022), our following short film that had yet to be filmed at that time. I like to tease future projects in these types of videos as they act as a promise that a certain piece of content will be released. You can see similar examples of this with the tease of Etna (2023) during our 2022 year in review, and the teases of three unannounced projects at the end of our two-year anniversary video!
The Present
Spirits Leaving would be the final time that we worked together before moving off to university, and this began a breakdown of communication. It became harder to chase up clients and organise our projects, and if it wasn’t for my university-produced projects, there would have been radio silence for a long time on our pages. There were differing opinions about how far we could take the future of Stuck Up Films, so it quietly faded out of our priorities, and we looked into other career options.
That all changed for the better in March 2023. Tom approached me with a plan of reforming Stuck Up Films and making a career out of it. I agreed in no time at all. We met up as soon as we could, registered the business, and most importantly we began shooting project after project. This era has been dominated by us entering the music scene and it has proved to be some of the most satisfying stuff we have ever worked on.
The word that keeps coming up in our heads is momentum. We want to continue the momentum of the last year and take Stuck Up Films to greater heights than ever before. Every day provides its challenges in running a business, managing social media, filming, editing, seeking out new clients and new opportunities… we hope to continue to show the results of this work!
- Mitchell
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