![]() “With low budget producing, you get exposed to so many different areas of the filmmaking chain,” Frake-Waterfield says. Living with Jeffrey, Frake-Waterfield picked up filmmaking “almost through osmosis.” Although still working at the energy company, he would often discuss projects with Jeffrey until eventually they began developing and producing together. But the end goal - when I finally get where I want to be - is serious filmmaking.” ![]() “Which is why I’ve gone down this route of constantly making films that are ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ or like, I just shot a film called ‘Monsternado.’ It’s ridiculous stuff. “Because I know that, annoyingly, with this industry it’s very much about like, ‘Oh, you’re the person that did this.’ It’s not always your ability,” says Jeffrey. Having achieved his goal, Jeffrey set his sights on making a film that would go viral. In the last eight years, Jeffrey has made 114 films – including “Tooth Fairy: Drill to Kill,” “Curse of Humpty Dumpty” and “Demonic Plastic Surgeon, MD” – every one of which has not only been distributed but, he says, has also made a profit. “The person before me might have had a short film in Sundance, but then I’m sat there with 100 feature films distributed,” he says. Vowing to become “the Terminator of producing,” he set himself the goal of making over 100 films by the age of 30, to stand out from the crowd. Jeffrey, who performs under a different name, also appeared in “Fox Trap,” but says he “very quickly learned that there’s no way I could act and produce on this budget. Jeffrey sold it to ITN Films, one of Walmart’s leading suppliers of micro-budget movies. “And I was like, ‘Okay, well, if I make my own stuff, then I can make my own possibilities.’” His debut film, made for under $12,000, was an “I Know What You Did Last Summer” knockoff called “Fox Trap,” which he wrote and produced. “As an actor, you’ve got zero control in any of it,” he explains. It was Jeffrey, fed up with auditions, who first pivoted to producing. “I’ve not ever been exposed to the luxury of having £500,000 ,” says Jeffrey. The duo live together - and make movies - frugally. Before joining the industry, neither had any connections to it. They met around a decade ago in their hometown of Essex: Frake-Waterfield was at college, Jeffrey was an actor. “They don’t want to be in something that they just think off the bat sounds, you know, crap.” Still, they managed to scrape together a cast that includes Craig David Dowsett as Pooh, Chris Cordell as Piglet and Amber Doig-Thorne and Natasha Tosini as the pair’s victims.ĭespite how it may sound, Frake-Waterfield and Jeffrey are not an overnight success. ![]() ![]() “They were worried about their careers,” adds Jeffrey. He says he had to beg crew to come on board while actors he had worked with on equally schlocky films were turning down “Pooh” point blank, convinced it was “going to absolutely bomb,” he says. Meanwhile, Frake-Waterfield’s colleagues were unconvinced. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood), his co-producer and Jagged Edge co-founder Scott Jeffrey was down the road making snowman slasher “Jack Frost.” “They were literally happening simultaneously,” Frake-Waterfield recalls. While Frake-Waterfield was overseeing “Pooh” in the middle of Ashdown Forest in Sussex (the real-life inspiration for A.A. It didn’t even have the filmmakers’ undivided attention. “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” didn’t have more of an auspicious start than Jagged Edge’s countless other productions when it started shooting in April 2022. “But I’d be lying if I said I remotely expected this degree of it being viral.” (Frake-Waterfield’s production company Jagged Edge and ITN Films, which co-financed the project, declined to give the exact budget for “Pooh” but indicated it was under $100,000). “I knew there was potential there for it to do really well,” Frake-Waterfield tells Variety of the project. Sure, those other films had already been out for some time, but “Pooh” was made for less than a hundredth of “M3GAN’s” $12 million budget.
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