The UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund and FilmFour teamed up in 2002 to create Cinema Extreme, a scheme to "encourage and develop filmmakers with a distinctive directorial voice and cinematic flair". Five films are being made in 2006 that hope to emulate the success of previous shorts such as Andrea Arnold's Wasp and Duane Hopkins' Love Me Or Leave Me Alone. In the third of our Cinema Extreme 2006 reports, The Blaine Brothers tell you how a children's film about a talking panda turned into a completely different beast.

There aren't many short films that feature a talking panda. There are even fewer that feature panda masturbation. OK, let's be honest: there's one - the Blaine Brothers' Hallo Panda. "We're trying to do something way too ambitious for the budget," reflects Chris Blaine during a break in shooting at Battersea Park. With an animatronic panda swallowing up a large proportion of the budget, the Blaines admit that things have been pretty, well, hairy. Production was delayed by two months due to problems setting up - of all things - a bank account. "The film was meant to be shot in the winter with lots of night scenes," says Ben. "And now we're about to shoot all of our night scenes two days after the shortest night of the year!"

The brothers started making films together whilst at school in the mid-90s, with their first short - Crowd Scene For Existentialists - following in 1998. Russell Square (2000), Burnt Bernard (2001) and Free Speech (2004) were all shortlisted by BAFTA for Best Short Film, while their most recent short, Death Of The Revolution, receives its premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August.

Hallo Panda is clearly their most ambitious work to date, and may well be the precursor to a feature next year - they have three in development. Just don't call them the British Coen Brothers - as their website notes, "We are just a pair of middle-class white boys from the suburbs of London and it's never been our dream to live in the smog of LA or the sweat of Cannes."

Hallo Panda will receive its UK premiere towards the end of 2006. Next week we report from the set of Martin Radich's Cinema Extreme short Dog's Mercury.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 20 July 06

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