It sounds cliche, but in the beginning - it was just my best mate and I shooting videos in a friends garage. This is one of them. Apart from having a slightly fancier website than mine (http://peterdaviesfilms.com/) Pete's a talented and successful documentry film maker in Sydney.
He's one of my best friends and was there in the beginning where we were both cutting our teeth on our first film projects and has stepped up to help in my recent projects Lady Luck and Diary Girl.
There is small collection of collaborative work I created with Pete Davies early 2011, we called it The Peter W Ren Project.
After completing a punchy little action cut to music, which is the one we're both the most proud of called 'Ping Pong Bullet Rally of Doom', I called Pete one spring afternoon* and pitched the idea of buidling our own trap inspired by the Saw movies and killing me in it over a weekend.
The hope was that it would gain some viral momentum and if we put a link at the end of the clip, it would send some traffic to our best work together.
It worked.
Our saw trap, called 'shear terror' (a pun. of course) has hit over 1.5 million views but more heart warmingly, sent nearly 30,000 viewers to Ping Pong Bullet Rally of Doom. Not bad for a short film with no name actors on a brand new channel. In addition to achieving a bit of exposure, we had a lot of fun playing with the saw style.
So if you can stomach it, enjoy our saw trap - or check out a couple of shorts we made together which were the seeds for both of our careers.