Written & Directed by James Millar
SWINE follows the journey of local rapper and lovable smart-ass Danny, AKA 'The Drunken Master'. On what seemed like a typical Friday night down the pub, Danny gets thrust into a world of mayhem after he wins the coveted SWINE Records competition. Despite a stark warning from fellow musician, Johnny Rocket, Danny decides to go and sign on the dotted line! Upon arriving at Swine Records he realizes he has made a huge mistake. Instead of a lavish office filled with champagne and beautiful women, Danny discovers something much more sinister. What follows is a high octane, pig throttling, raucous extravaganza into the unknown as 'The Big Dirty', led by 'Johnny Rocket', attempt the most insane rescue mission ever! Danny knew the competition would change his life... but not like this!
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH JAMES
Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
Raised in a movie loving household there was only 1 thing I ever wanted to do in life, make movies!
I started making short films in college while studying interactive design and digital media. They we're mainly experimental shorts and terrible music videos but once I started there was no going back!
I've since made over 20 award winning short films and music videos as well as having 3 music videos appear on MTV.
What inspiration and influences made you want to create Swine?
After being let down and taken advantage of by some senior people in the music industry I was feeling very deflated by the whole prospect of music videos and production and decided I wanted to create something that showed the music industry for what it was.
This sparked a bit of an avengers moment and I decided to pull together some great local musicians and a very talented producer and create something special to show what we were capable of with no label interference.
Creatively I was inspired by films like Predator and Aliens - this idea of a group of people taking on something bigger and more powerful than them and then ultimately defeating it really resonated with me.
Stylistically I was massively influenced by the works of Edgar Wright, Guy Ritchie and James Gun - amazing directors who have managed to blend action and comedy so well!
What obstacles did you overcome while in the making of this film?
We had so many obstacles thrown at us when making SWINE, to start with we needed money to hire equipment and for props - more money than we had available anyway - and to raise the money we did a crowd funding campaign and even hosted a fund raising gig, both of which went really well and managed to raise just over £2k which was great.
Unfortunately though, that money only stretched so far and meant we had to go above and beyond to secure props and locations for as cheap as possible, if not free.
One example of this was the pig masks, we wanted to pig people to look as real as possible and the only masks we found that could achieve that were going to cost around £900 each and we needed at least 5 which quickly ruled them out, so instead myself and Phil Chapman went about making our own silicone pig masks from a 3d printed mould.
This actually ended up being a huge blessing as it meant our pig people were unique to our production and ended up being considerably cheaper as well!
The next set of issues for us were location based. Our first secured location, a place called Boothlane College in Northampton, unfortunately let us down after seeing some of our previous work and deciding that whatever we were making wouldn't be suitable which was a real shame as the majority of us had studied there at some point in our lives. We then found another location, an empty set of office blocks that was perfect for our shoot, but with less than two weeks before the shoot the building was condemned due to the discovery of asbestos.
So with two weeks till the shoot and everyone already booked in and everything organised we went on a crazy mission to find a new location in time and luckily for us a place in Kettering called the Knib an old victoriana school building stepped up and also let us use it for free!
There were many other setbacks and issues not to mention covid, which completely stopped our production half way through, but we were able to overcome them all and get SWINE out there eventually!
You have a pretty FX heavy film. How were you able to pull that off and how did that affect your budget?
Myself and Phil Chapman who own and run Giantdwarf have both worked in vfx for many years in different agencies and for different companies. We currently both work for Jaguar Land Rover in design working in the visualisation team.
We managed to create all of the vfx in the film between the two of us with myself focusing on pyrotechnics, explosions, edit and grade and Phil focusing on the big cg spots such as the van smashing through the wall and prison cells.
We also used a lot of practical effects alongside the cg to help uplift the realism for example we developed a system using an upturned leaf blower to create the clouds of money on each of the pig pop explosions.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences.
Promotion and social media have unfortunately for us always been a struggle especially when we were so focused on the post production of the film itself.
We created a lot of trailers for the film as well as a Press pack that we sent out to as many different film blogs as possible.
A major factor for SWINE was also the final edit length. Originally the film was 24 minutes long, which we were actually pretty happy with until we were turned down by some festivals and online film sites like Film Shortage due to the film being too long.
Then something really special happened and an editor called Colin Goudie who was the lead editor on Star Wars: Rouge One and Monsters messaged me saying he had come across the press pack and really enjoyed the film and he had some feedback if we were interested which of course we were!
A 2 hour zoom call later and Colin had helped me to get SWINE down to the 16min cut time it is now and to top it off Film Shortage said they loved the new cut and decided to accept the film!
What are you working on now?
Currently I'm extremely busy at JLR working on a collaboration project with Baracuta clothing which will be dropping in the next few weeks. It's a 1 min fashion film and promo spot that I'm very proud of.
I'm also writing my first feature script for a project were hoping to get started on next year called Shoetown.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Being from Northampton and a huge fan of local hero Alan Moore who wrote Watchmen and many other gems there's only really 1 film I can recommend right now and that's a fantastic locally produced feature film called 'The Show' which was also edited by Colin Goudie.