One Man, One Interview

Rocco Sulkin is one quarter of the creative student team that made the ingenious One Minute, One Take videos, which have gathered an impressive following on YouTube and brought their makers an equally impressive notoriety on campus and in the press, including GMTV, ITV-Yorkshire, The Independent, Metro, and The New York Times comedy blog. As if this wasn’t enough media exposure, Rocco has done us the favour of letting himself be interviewed by Features Co-ordinator James Hodgson, and reveals some of the secrets of his success.

JH: Let’s cut to the chase: where did you get the idea for your first video, Forrest Gump (FG)?
RS: Basically we entered a competition where you had to make a film in one minute! And simultaneously there was a York film society activity going on called the '48 Hour Project'. So we thought it’d be a good idea to do the two at once and get to use the film society’s resources. We chose Forrest Gump because it’s very linear and episodic; it’s literally one man narrating his own life story, which made it relatively easy to translate into the one-minute format and was a useful device for me (playing Forrest) to draw the video together. I think I thought to do it in one take, and Joe came up with the idea of doing FG, but it was very much a collective process.

JH: How did you do a project like that in the space of 48 hours?
RS: Well, we [Joe Burgess, Laura Archer, and Rocco] got together on the Saturday morning to decide what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We spent the day writing the script, buying props (which Laura was amazing at), getting friends and housemates involved as extras and booking the Astroturf. We got there at 6am the next morning and spent a while setting up benches, tables, etc, and filmed until 9. In the end we only had 10 minutes to get it right and in the background you can see some angry looking hockey players who’d booked the pitch after us waiting to start their game. We spent Sunday evening editing and then submitted it to the Empire film competition. We actually didn’t even get into the top five, but we were ‘highly commended’, which was a nice consolation prize. I did learn that there’s a surprising amount of effort that goes into making something look amateur!

JH: What was the division of labour on the set (that is, the Astroturf)?
RS: The way we broke it down on the day was that Joe would have the script and tell people what to do while walking behind the camera. Will [Tribble] mainly got involved in the editing phase, but since then he’s been very much a part of the whole process. I was the main actor and we all sort of ended up directing. It turned out that we all had predominant roles but it wasn’t really planned that way.

JH: After the initial round of success that the first video had was it difficult to come up ideas for sequels?
RS: It wasn’t that hard, actually. Everybody had lots of good ideas, but the difficult thing was to find the right one. Kill Bill (KB) worked in a similar way to FG, as it’s literally done in chapters as The Bride’s journey. To deal with the flashbacks, what you see in the video is chronological rather than as it happens in the film. And because there isn’t a narrator we put more emphasis on dialogue. Star Wars ended up being a bit too ambitious, so we basically just made into a joke and took the piss out of ourselves. 28 Days was more similar to the first two, as it’s focused on one man’s journey and quite episodic.

JH: Any films you’d have liked to have done but couldn’t?
RS: Yeah, definitely. We wanted to do something with James Bond where he’d meet all his enemies and kill them all in their specific ways. And we wanted to do The Godfather, maybe as two separate videos or storylines. And The Matrix, too; that would fulfil a boyhood fantasy. We even thought of a way to do the bullet-time effect. Maybe we’ll still do them at some point in the future.

JH: How did you react to the YouTube comments? I know not all of them were positive, especially for Star Wars.
RS: Well, you know that people can say the weirdest things, but some of them were just horrible and abjectly racist. It’s never good to expect success, but Star Wars got a lot of personal attacks, which knocked our confidence a bit. We knew we were taking a gamble by deliberately subverting our format, but it makes more sense when you see the normal films and realise it’s a self-parody. Anyway, the ones that actually sting the most are the ones that point out genuine flaws – where people have actually evaluated what you’ve done and given good reasons as to why they don’t like it. That said, most comments are quite flattering. In fact, there are two groups that have imitated our format – one from Spain and another from Germany. And I guess that’s the sincerest form of flattery.

JH: So what do you think made FG such a hit?
RS: I think what made it successful was the whimsical nature of it and the way it got spread by word-of-mouth. It relies a lot on luck, really, and I think KB and 28 Days were a lot more sophisticated. We got better props and hired professional actors, whereas with FG we just did it in our spare time. But none of our subsequent films have been as popular as that, which makes you feel a bit unrewarded but also grateful that the first one was such a hit. I still can’t understand it, to be honest. I suppose it works well specific to YouTube, but there are much better things out there that get much fewer views.

JH: Do you think fame has gone to your head?
RS: I don’t think so. It is nice when people recognise you around campus. For example, we were in the library and a first year student came up to Will and asked for his autograph. He was so flustered he wrote the girl’s name instead of his! So we’re just incompetent at handling any kind of fame. But it does have its practical benefits.

JH: Which leads me to my next question: what’s next for Team Sulkin?
RS: [Laughs] We’ve started our own company called Felt Tip Films, which is a registered trademark, and we’re working on a website… which is taking ages. We’ve just done a series of adverts for an advertising company that involved hiring out a bar, stop-motion cameras and not much sleep. But we’re starting to work more as a unit even though we’re all doing our own things. We want to make a music video and there are some other projects on the horizon. We basically want to expand the range of stuff we can do. We all said that if it was a success then we’d carry on doing it… and so far it’s going quite well.

JH: Finally, is their any advice you can give to undergrads who want to replicate your success?
RS: Get lucky!

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