Making of a ‘metamentary’ – Rough Cut by Jamie Shovlin

Still from artist Jamie Shovlin’s film Rough Cut

How do you remake a film that never existed? That’s the premise behind the first feature film from Hackney-based artist Jamie Shovlin, best-known for his elaborate fictions exploring the tension between truth and tale, reality and invention and history and memory.

Borne out of his earlier Lustfaust project that involved the production of various memorabilia for a 70s glam rock band that never in fact existed, Rough Cut is billed as a ‘metamentary’ on the making of a fictional exploitation movie called Hiker Meat.

“I was always into slasher films as a kid which, looking back from a more mature standpoint, is kind of embarrassing. But I was interested in the idea of an entire genre of film of standardised, repetitive variations on a theme,” Shovlin says.

“The films were made on shoestring budgets and the makers really made a virtue of their limitations something I find quite admirable really.”

In collaboration with Shovlin, writer Mike Harte and composer Euan Rodger produced a mock screenplay and soundtrack for the fictional slasher flick set in an American summer camp, from which a cut-and-paste prototype was made from a collage of over 1,500 vintage film clips.

With support from Manchester’s Cornerhouse, Shovlin and his team of collaborators relocated to the Lake District in June to film Rough Cut based on sections of the prototype and a Hiker Meat trailer.

Featuring a beautiful blonde hitchhiker with a troubled past who heads to an all-American summer camp where hippie kids fall victim to a monstrous lactating worm, restaged scenes from the fictional Hiker Meat are the jumping-off point for the so-called ‘metamentary’, described by Shovlin as a “kind of ode to the power of the imagination”.

Interspersed with behind-the-scenes footage from the set and details about the making of the development of the project from conception to finished feature, Rough Cut offers a thought-provoking take on the variously mundane and surreal mechanics of the creative industries.

Rough Cut is on general release from 6 December 2013.