Dredd Sequel: Whatever It Takes? (2014)
Whatever It Takes? was one of the first things we made with the GoPro Hero 3 Black, basically as an excuse to see what sort of action and point-of-view shots we could get out of it. I was also a big fan of Dredd (2012), and there was a campaign running at the time trying to get a sequel made, so naturally I built a daft little film around an obsessive Dredd fan going to increasingly ridiculous lengths to get home for something very important.
We threw pretty much everything we could think of at it: running around Derby, climbing through a car park, driving, motorbikes, free-running and supposedly jumping off a waterfall. My brother, who at the time fancied himself as a stuntman, did some of the parkour work, but when it came to jumping into the water he decided it was too cold. It wasn’t. He was just being a wimp, so I ended up doing that bit myself.
There were a few genuine mishaps too. I badly sprained my ankle during one section but carried on performing in character, so I left it in the film. My Kawasaki ZX9R also broke down before we’d finished shooting, which meant returning months later and reshooting some of the bike material with a Suzuki DR650.
The whole journey turns out to be about getting home because my girlfriend has phoned to say the new Dredd Blu-ray has arrived. I’d actually ordered an extra copy purely so I could open the Amazon package on camera, then gave it to my brother afterwards. Very high-budget production planning.
It’s rough, silly and far too long for what it is, but that was really the point. We were testing what this little GoPro could do and learning by doing stupid things with it. And yes, by the end I’m wearing a cardboard Judge Dredd helmet. Cinema.
We threw pretty much everything we could think of at it: running around Derby, climbing through a car park, driving, motorbikes, free-running and supposedly jumping off a waterfall. My brother, who at the time fancied himself as a stuntman, did some of the parkour work, but when it came to jumping into the water he decided it was too cold. It wasn’t. He was just being a wimp, so I ended up doing that bit myself.
There were a few genuine mishaps too. I badly sprained my ankle during one section but carried on performing in character, so I left it in the film. My Kawasaki ZX9R also broke down before we’d finished shooting, which meant returning months later and reshooting some of the bike material with a Suzuki DR650.
The whole journey turns out to be about getting home because my girlfriend has phoned to say the new Dredd Blu-ray has arrived. I’d actually ordered an extra copy purely so I could open the Amazon package on camera, then gave it to my brother afterwards. Very high-budget production planning.
It’s rough, silly and far too long for what it is, but that was really the point. We were testing what this little GoPro could do and learning by doing stupid things with it. And yes, by the end I’m wearing a cardboard Judge Dredd helmet. Cinema.