Last week we sat down with Travis Wardrope, 19, Harrison Andrews, 19 and Cameron Occleston, 18 who are the 3 minds behind 1Wrd Productions.
1Wrd Productions is a local and independent filmmaking production team who have created a variety of exciting projects including short films, experimental documentaries, still image short films, and more.
We talked everything from their inspiration to, upcoming projects and where it all began for them...
Tell us about what you do, and why you do it
1Wrd productions is a filmmaking company that we started in 2019, however we really started making films when we were 8 years old, all 3 of us together at primary school.
It’s something that we’re really passionate about doing. We originally started by making Doctor Who fan videos, and from there it came into film. We just never stopped, we’ve just been making films for years as best friends which is really cool.
Who would you say are your biggest influences when it comes to your filmmaking?
I would probably say people like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, and David Fincher as well, so we like a bit of variety when it comes to our projects.
They don’t all look the same at the moment, which is something that we’re trying to work on in order to create a style that is true to us and that you would only get with us, but at the moment we’ve been doing a wide variety of things and just experimenting.
Obviously you have a few projects on your YouTube channel, do you think that you have a definitive favourite or one that you’re most proud of?
I’d say the one that we’re most proud of is Damnation, which is a project that we did for college. We went above and beyond the brief we’d been set and tried really hard to push ourselves on that, and we even got some actors down and went really deep into scouting the perfect locations for that one, so it came out just about exactly how we wanted.
Obviously there’s a few things we could improve now, but looking back on it, that's probably the project that we’re most proud of.
What do you think you want to accomplish going forward with filmmaking?
Ideally we’d want to make the production company bigger; we have a few members currently but we really want to expand on what we’re doing at the moment. We moved to Manchester for university, and we originally came from Carlisle, so we’ve just been meeting all sorts of different people and we’ve been doing paid work with different companies as well which has been really good.
But yeah, the idea is that we want to work towards making feature films, and that’s something we’re really pushing towards over the next year or two, so yeah, the main goal is to start producing feature films and to have a budget that can facilitate that well.
How do you find the motivation to keep going, or what keeps your passions spurred?
I mean, keeping motivation up can be hard at some points, like when we were making
Damnation we really hit quite a low point, but I would say because it’s a passion that we’ve been doing most of our lives and it’s something we all want to do in the future, so the general drive of wanting it to work out and never stopping pushing means we take up opportunities wherever we can, especially because we’re all in university.
What advice would you give somebody who's interested in a hobby in filmmaking, or who wants to pursue a career in the industry?
I think the main piece of advice I’d give someone is to just make as much as you can, and just keep sticking at it. A lot of the things we’ve learned haven’t come form college or university, it’s just things we’ve learned ourselves through trying out different things. Just keep creating, and even if it’s not very good you’ll get better over time without even realising it.
Is there anything that you’re working on currently?
So we're currently working on a project that’ll be our biggest yet, so it’s in a very early stage of pre-production, but we’re hoping to make something a lot longer than we usually do and it’ll take up a lot more of our time.
It’ll be central to Manchester since we wanna highlight through film the big move that we’ve done and just really use the location that we have available to us not because it’s absolutely unlike anything we’ve had. Being from Cumbria where it’s a lot of countryside and rural area, it’s all just city so we really wanna centralise on the fact that we do have this city and we definitely will be using it.