HENRY & AARON
All Hail The New Kings
Of Perth Comedy

Things are coming up trumps for Perth filmmakers Henry Inglis and Aaron McCann, who’ve just scored themselves $50,000 to fund the production of a seven part sitcom care of Movie Extra’s WebFest competition.

After months of vigorous campaigning both on and off social networking sites, Inglis and McCann have finally achieved what they set out to do and the pair couldn’t be more excited about the task that lies ahead of them.
Before the boys can temporarily retire from society to begin work on their seven part sitcom, they caught up with X-Press Magazine to chat about filmmaking, Christmas Specials and how to make comedy gold with a ludicrously small budget. 

By EMMA BERGMEIER

When did the two of you meet?
Aaron McCann: It was 2002, we met at TAFE. We were both in two separate classes but we knew of each other. In 2003 I was directing my graduation film and I got on board Henry as an editor and we clicked in terms of personality. After we finished the film we kept catching up and writing little comedy sketches and from there it all grew.

What made you want to work with each other?
AM: Money (laughs). It’s weird, personalities click and you just want to work with the same sort of personalities. We had a very similar sense of humour and Henry had edit suites, so whenever we shot something we’d go to Henry’s house to cut it because he was the only person we knew who had an edit suite.
Henry Inglis: At that time we were still cutting reel to reel footage, because digital hadn’t come around by that stage.
AM: We’ve been around since the early days. The days of the talkies (laughs).
HI: I remember when Aaron first came around and said ‘I’ve got a talky for you to see, you’ve got to fucking see this!’ and I was just blown away by having vision and sound together.
AM: You would never know that we’re in our early 80s.

What kind of films were you making when you first began collaborating?
AM: Henry had done a very dark kind of psychological drama called Blank Point and my graduation film was called Black Swan, just like the Natalie Portman film. We had done a graduation film and he had written this comedy that he needed another actor for, so his sister and me starred in a comedy film called Clash. From then on we collaborated on comedy stuff. We did a few little things for TropFest that never really got in and we’d work on little skits just for ourselves and then we started doing PAC Workshops together and practically everything we did at those workshops always had a comedy flavour to it.
HI: When it comes to being a student filmmaker it’s hard to know what you want to be making in the future. When I was starting out I thought I wanted to be making films and the films that I liked were Fight Club and others with darker themes, films with black humour. As I’ve grown over the years I’ve become more specific with what I want to be doing and have started being influenced by different things. When we were doing these PAC Workshops together was the time when I decided that I just really wanted to do comedy because I get something out of it.
AM: For me personally, working with Henry is where the comedy comes from but I just recently finished a horror film, which is the complete opposite to that. I like working on different things all of the time and everytime me and Henry work together it’s always comedy. We keep the drama there but there’s always comedy.
HI: I love black comedy.
AM: I think the darker it is the funnier it is.

When did you first begin hatching a plan for this sit com?
HI: In late 2007. We had written and were going to produce a no-budget thriller feature that we could shoot ourselves around Perth and do it for $5000 or whatever. For some reason or another we lost track, we wrote the script and then lost interest a little bit but we still wanted to do something.
AM: We felt like we had to make a feature before we were 25.
HI: There was always a thing that stopped us which was that it was really hard to find the right actors who were at our skill level but could perform in the way we needed them to.
AM: Also writing it we decided it would be a really small film but then the writing got bigger and more ambitious and then we went ‘there’s no way we can do this, so what’s the quickest, easiest thing to do?’… we’ll be in it. It will just be about us and we can act in it and direct it.
HI: So we came up with an idea about these two podcasters who are a comedy duo who think they’re really funny but none of their friends think they’re funny.
AM: We wrote the script and it was kind of long and we did a reading for a small group through PAC and from there all the feedback was like ‘very episodic, it could be a TV series’. And we were like ‘yeah, it could be, let’s rework it and re-pitch it’. From there we re-pitched it and wrote down ideas from other discarded scripts and that became the basis. We had 20 or so episode ideas and we whittled it down to about 10 really solid ideas and began working on a pitch and developing it into a series and that’s where WebFest came along.

How many other competitors were there in the WebFest competition?
AM: About 107 or 108. We were one of the later entries, we were #57 or #58 to enter, so it had been open for a while. We were like ‘okay we’ve got the trailer now let it just fly with the wind and maybe it will happen or maybe it won’t’. Then we got into the finals and the big internet campaign started. It was all really about how you market yourself, which we had never really become accustomed to doing. From there it was a shock to find out we had won.

Are you excited about having $50,000 to fund the production of a seven part sitcom having worked on a shoe-string budget for so long?
HI: It’s very exciting! I think the biggest thing it will do for us is taking the load off us having to run around and do everything. With the Christmas Special it was me and Aaron running around, driving to places to get props and batteries, fixing any problems that came up, operating the boom. Even though we were only shooting for three days, the Christmas Special really took it out of me physically and that’s always been the case for shorts that we’ve done, it’s always been frantic.
AM: There are scenes where both of us had to be in front of the camera so we’d have to set the shot up then run in front of the camera.
HI: There were days when we didn’t have any crew whatsoever. We’ve had that experience of being under crewed and exhausting ourselves so it will be great to actually hire people to fill in all those roles that we were doing.
AM: For us to just focus on the writing, a bit of the producing side and really dedicate ourselves to the acting will give us a different dynamic and will hopefully make it better.
So what now, are you busy preparing to shoot the seven episodes?
AM: We’ve got an outline for the episodes but we’ll probably re-jig a few of them. We’re trying to re-jig them and make them funny so they can act as a stepping stone to help us get a half hour series up.
HI: We see the series as a promo for what we can do, advertising the brand of Henry & Aaron then that will open a lot of doors hopefully.

What happens when the episodes are finished?
AM: It goes through mnc.tv which is the Movie Network Channel. They screen the episodes on their website exclusively and then after it’s done its run on their website it screens on the Movie Extra channel. From there we have to do blogs and posts about it to keep it cross platform. Hopefully, with enough recognition and fans behind it it can progress forward and possibly be on Movie Extra or one of the Foxtel channels they own.

What do you attribute your win to?
HI: All the other entries were worthy contenders, all the finalists’ films were really well done. What we’ve been told is that they liked the way the film looked, the strength of the concept and of the performances and they thought the campaign and marketing were really well run. Chris Berry the Movie Extra Executive Producer thought it was the best trailer and that the Christmas Special sealed the deal. He told us that it was a unanimous decision between the four judges that ours was the best product.
AM: The Christmas Special was very much an after thought. We didn’t know what we were going to do in the lead up to it…
HI: We just wanted to do one big extra thing to get us over the line.

View Henry & Aaron’s winning WebFest entry plus other shorts by the talented duo online at youtube.com/henryandaaron.