Where did it all begin? Way back in the autumn of 1999 that’s where! The erstwhile brothers of film Paul Williams and Paul Terry met at University after sharing make-up. What? Isn’t that how all male chums meet; over a half-used lipstick? Ok, PW will explain:

After a year on a Palaeontology course (don’t ask, that’s a whole other story) I switched to English and Creative Studies at Portsmouth University. Portsmouth – the gateway to the Isle of Wight and basically a town that suddenly stops and the sea starts, like someone forgot to put the coastline in and just added the sea. The course was a mixture of English (that’s reading lots of books and philosophising over the meaning of art and reality to those of you who took Sports Science) and Creative Studies, which covered the whole, writing, drama, theatre, film thing.

It was a great three years, a time when you could experiment with all different styles of writing and theatre and hair colour and not have to worry about anyone wondering what the hell you were doing. Our first task for the theatre element of the course was to write and perform a four minute monologue, in an actual theatre, to an audience of actual living and breathing people. We all cacked our collective pants.

Being the cheery fellow’s that we are I wrote a comedy monologue about Death and Paul Terry explored his tortured artistic soul with a monologue about a tortured man tied to a chair. We portrayed pale characters and both wore white face paint (and you all thought we met at a Rocky Horror Show performance). We shared make up and fast became firm friends, sharing that passion to be creative and fly in the face of convention – or at the very least sneak up to it and trip convention up when it wasn’t looking.

Over the next two years we worked on projects at University which accumulated in our final piece, the short film Sold. We had a choice at the end of our course: you could either write a long and boring dissertation that would only be read once and then filed away under ‘collect dust’ or you could create a short theatre piece. It took us a month or so to convince our lectures that a film was a theatre piece – only on a tape rather than a stage. After fighting hard and making a two minute film that involved my then flatmate Alex pretending to slit his wrists and dying in a bath (I am a cheery person, I swear) they allowed us to make Sold.

So, in the autumn of 1999 the Evil Hypnotist was born and Sold was made.

Way back in 1999, just a few months after the birth of the Evil Hypnotist, the family had it's first premiere. Held in the drafty Wiltshire Studio in even more drafty Portsmouth, about a hundred people watched the premiere of Sold.

Here are some pictures from that momentous evening.