A Brief History.......
So Who Are You Guys?
S&J Productions is the combined work of two men, Simon Cresswell (The S) and James Tilling (The J), who founded this company at the age of eleven years old in 1994. Both men, who grew up on a diet of nineteen eighties excess including many Arnold Schwarzenegger films, were first introduced to a video camera in the summer of 1990 at Sallyport in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Here there Grandad first let them have a go with his brand new video camera, a basic family holiday camera he'd brought in a moment of madness. They instantly filmed the surrounding area, each other mucking around, and then attempted some stop motion animation for good measure. The passion for cinema was born, and the next few years consisted of the two boys trying to re-create scenes from there favorite films in the back garden. This lead to what's generally regarded as their first film, 'Low budget doctor who'. A parody of the Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who's they had grown up watching in the 1980's, but with a twist, the people making the film had no budget and therefore had to improvise. Daleks were action man tanks, and the doctors assistant in the tv program 'Ace' was represented here by a pair of womens boots running away!
What followed after this film was many a parody of every film the pair could think of, Reservoir Dogs, Blues Brothers, Terminator, James bond, Die hard, each with an added comic flare. Comedy it seemed came naturally to the pair, who had an expandable array of costumes and props on permanent loan from there grandparents. Over the next few years they worked there way through an array of video cameras and progressed in technical terms dramatically. On the early films there was no editing, they were shoot in order and the camera was just stopped and started for each scene. You would have a complete film by the end of the shoot but the poor camera equiptment meant that any mistakes during filming had to be left in and covered up with acting, as correcting them involved ejecting the tape and taking it inside to rewind it to the previous scene! In every insane shoot James and Simon would play all the characters in there over complex shorts, changing costume back and forth for each separate take and character. In 'Book of the Dead II' a trio of horror stories, the pair recorded outside there grandparents garden for the first time filming part of the story in a near by woods, and while on holiday in Corfu!!
Music in the early films was just as complicated as everything else, with the pair using a stereo and pressing play at the start of a scene to create the appropriate score for the scene they were shooting. If you look closely at there early films you can see the stereo in shot and even being pressed at the right moment. As time progressed the pair eventually entered into the computer age and started editing there films on a cheap editing program. This ment no more stopping and starting the camera and having a stereo for sound! By 2004 after ten years of cheap imitations and over-use of the same locations, they finally started shooting there films on DV and editing on better equiptment. By now the films were pre-planed down to the detail and often scripts were made (though not always followed as a large part of S&J is improvising to get a more edgy and unexpected feel) to make things easier to shoot. Farncombe, Surrey is still there principal shooting location but bits of films have been shoot as far a field as Southampton and deep in the heart of Surrey's vast Woodland.
By starting from a young age the pair have single handedly taught themselves how to make (and not to make) films. Both Simon and James have Film based degree's under there belt and are constantly pushing into new areas with there small company. In 2006 they made there first music video and in 2007 they had several of there films shown at public screenings. Not bad for two people who started in a back garden with the family video camera.