THE STORY BEHIND BEN AND J: ON GANGS

THE BACKGROUND• Back in the day, around March 2015, Magna Academy was

targeted by a gang of ruthless young fellas. They began intimidating the local community, leaving their mark on everything from dustbins to NHS signs, spreading their communist ideology across the land.

• We began developing the idea for ‘Ben and J: On Gangs’ shortly after we had finished ‘Deep Thunder’, our AS Media video film opening. Jordan and I both wanted to base a series around the local area and really felt we had a lot of material around the 2keys graffiti.

• Initially, the series was going to be entirely improvised, with characters and events made up as we went along. Although we filmed two interviews and several other scenes without a script, we found it very challenging and were struggling to get it all to make sense despite some fantastic improvisation from actors.

• Eventually we created the Ben and J world, with fictional gangs, crime experts, communist farmers and so on with the potential to be an entire full length series – something we do have plans to produce in the future.

THE SCRIPT• Because the series was initially improvised, no

script was ever produced until September 2015, just a few weeks before principle photography would begin.

• We were extremely ambitious with the number of scenes we wanted to get into our final cut, we wanted about 5 different locations within the video.

• We knew it would be a huge task and that we’d never fit it all into the final cut. We intended to film enough footage to be able to make a 30 minute video afterwards. The intention was to shorten every scene to fit a 5 minute edit.

• There were several scenes that we scripted but were never filmed, partially due to a very tight schedule and also because we decided some material just didn’t fit the series.

THE TEAM• Having worked together in our AS Media video; ‘Deep Thunder’, Jordan and I knew we were a great

partnership on screen together and we both agreed we wanted to make the mockumentary as joint presenters.

• We wanted to improve on our AS project as-well as introduce some more creative talent. This is why we enlisted the help of Tom, an extremely versatile actor. He went on to portray several different characters for us including Ruff McTuffen and Viin Lyee.

• In an attempt to ensure we had a strong and very talented technical crew with specialist equipment, we got our friends; Francis, Jamie and Guy to help out. They formed the production crew for our test footage and were very helpful – as was their filming and recording equipment including tripods, boom-mics and lighting.

March 2014

July2014

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