Film trio finish first mockumentary

Dunedin’s Nic Larsen (from left), Guy Pigden and Harle Neville moved to Wellington to further...
Dunedin’s Nic Larsen (from left), Guy Pigden and Harle Neville moved to Wellington to further their film-making careers.
Pigville Productions describes itself as a male threesome who want to do nothing else but make films.

The Dunedin natives, who now reside in Wellington, have been immersing themselves in all aspects of film-making ever since they made their first movie Superstition Bites while at Logan Park High School in 1999.

Made up of Harley Neville (25), Nic Larsen (26) and Guy Pigden (25), each has their own unique role in Pigville Productions which prides itself on high-quality, lowbudget guerrilla film-making and a lot of toilet humour.

Neville is the public face of the production company and comes up with the concepts, Pigden writes the scripts and edits the films, while Larson, who has worked on The Lord Of The Rings and King Kong, is in charge of the technical side of things.

The threesome, who all have day jobs to supplement their filmmaking, have just finished their first mockumentary, The Project, which Pigden believes ‘‘may even hold the answer to the meaning of life''.

Neville describes The Project as a fictional mockumentary webseries based on fact.

‘‘[It is a] comedy web series we have been working on for the last year and have finally finished. It is 15, seven to 10 minute episodes, that follow the ups and downs of our career so far,'' Mr Neville said.

The move from Dunedin to Wellington had been beneficial for the trio, Pigden said.

"Not knocking Dunners, but when I moved there wasn't anything really happening down here. Since then, that's changed and Dunedin has developed a great film-making community. But back then it was Welly or Auckland if you wanted to get serious about being in the film industry.

"Dunedin's come a long way and there's a lot of really interesting initiatives and projects in development - it's actually pretty exciting. Shout out to Screen Dunedin.

"The big difference I've noticed is that it's very easy to find people willing to lend you their time and expertise down here [in Dunedin]. Whereas in Wellington it's much more difficult to find people eager to help you out. Having said that, there's still a lot more going on in Wellington and that won't change anytime soon.''

As for advice for up and coming film-makers, Neville believes you need to take the bad with the good.

"If you make a crap film, learn from it, don't give up. Our first film was about a killer zombie in Opoho cemetery that killed people then danced on the graves of its victims.

"Also you should always have another project in the works. I have met a lot of people that call themselves film-makers and then when I ask what they have done they show me one film that they shot two years ago. That doesn't mean you are a filmmaker, that means you made a film.''

So far Pigville Productions films have had 85,000 views on You Tube, nearly half of which are for one particular film known as Disgusting Hairy Man which has over 40,000 views alone.

- For more information on Pigville Productions visit www.youtube.com/pigville2 or www.pigville.co.nz

Alternatively you can search for Pigville on Facebook.

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