Blood and guts on a budget

Craig Anderson from ABC’s television series Double The Fist explains how he created blood and guts on the small screen with an even smaller budget.

Double the Fist, the brainchild of film-maker and special effects maven Craig Anderson, is a ludicrous mix of black humour, comic-book violence and preposterous plot lines. As the first series “was essentially a mock-up of an extreme sports show”, Anderson decided that when he had network approval for the second series, he would make things a bit more interesting. “Now it’s kind of like Gladiators meets a game show – take no prisoners,” he laughs. “We were feeling a bit limited by the sports genre so we wanted to branch out.”

The first five minutes of the new series features enough gut-wrenching stunts to weather even the most hardcore viewer. Anderson’s character, team leader Steve Foxx, wages war on weakness, which he says is “affecting almost 90 percent of the Australian population.” This grand exploitation of rugged machismo is perfectly suited to Anderson, who wears flannelette, orange aviators and slicked back greasy hair and whose character generally comes across more like a psychopathic council worker than a superhero. But then, tapping into bogan culture is all part of the joke; Foxx’s brother Rod wears bike shorts and drinks ludicrous amounts of Powerade to fuel his super-human speed and Mephisto, the disgruntled security guard, constantly comes up with ways to scam money from the authorities.

There’s a reason this show is rated MA15+ and was screened relatively late at night. Despite the fact that all of the violence, blood and gore in the show is undeniably fake, it’s done so well that casual audiences will be convinced that someone is being stabbed, decapitated or dismembered on national television. Steve Foxx regularly smacks his team mates and send them flying off screen, librarians use borrower cards to cause grievous bodily harm, and councilmen devour babies whole. This is definitely not a series you want to show your kid sister. I should know, I tried it, and she ran screaming from the room.

“We kind of wanted to [ape] those reality TV shows like Jackass, but there was no way I was actually doing any of that stuff for real!” says Anderson. Surely in the course of filming, he experienced the painful side of orchestrating stunts, even if they were contrived? “Look I can’t say I appreciate what [Johnny Knoxville] does in Jackass, but I definitely respect it. There’s a lot of pain involved even when you’re faking it.”

When big-budget films shoot stunts like Spiderman crawling up a building, the actor is usually shot on a mattress in front of a green (or blue) screen with the Manhattan skyscraper dropped in during post-production. On a local television budget, Anderson and his team didn’t exactly have the studio time or money to throw around, so they improvised. They incorporated the visual tricks into live shots, so that they would not have to use much green screen at all. “There are certain things that you can actually set up before the shoot…” (he then proceeds to explain how you can cut a guy’s head off without actually cutting it off).

“Generally it will take us maybe a month to shoot on location and up to four in the studios editing – which is a hell of a lot!” For example turning a very sexy Hollie Andrew into a vending machine will probably take some after-hours touch-ups. Ditto on two council trucks that morph into a Transformers-esque monolith, which wreaks havoc on the local landscape.

When he’s not leading a bunch of degenerates on the small-screen, Anderson is watching the big one (he is a self-confessed fan of action films, especially the Bourne series). As a first-hand witness to the excruciating attention to detail needed for special effects, Anderson has massive respect for film houses that create great, realistic looking stunts, “like car chases or huge battles”. And though he doesn’t think he would have the patience to work as part of such a big team – “I don’t want to be the guy animating Shrek’s left toe!” – he is more than happy to continue on his good streak of meta-drama. Double The Fist is as absurd as it is an incisive exploration of testosterone fuelled Aussie culture. Be sure to catch it, or Foxx and his gang will more than likely find you and chop off your legs. Metaphorically, of course.

- Jonno Seidler