By Tash Paul
Perth certainly isn’t Hollywood, but it does have an appetite for independent films. Take Taylor Broadley’s Stubbornly Here (2024), currently at Revelation Film Festival, and Alexander Lorian’s Good for Nothing Blues (2022), previously at the WA Made Film Festival.
But, as you expect in the small city of Perth, producing an independent film, and ‘making it big’, can be difficult. Just ask former UWA student, Giles Chan. The twenty-four-year old’s debut indie film, Jellyfish (2024), premieres at Luna Leederville this Thursday night, and the journey to the final cut was no easy feat.
In fact, Jellyfish took three years to make, given the abstract, experimental process of independent filmmaking.
“It happened through osmosis, and that’s the reason it took three years because the osmosis had to happen,” Giles said.
“I had to squeeze [the film] out of me like a sponge, there was no defined process, no structure to it, like no path.”
Indeed, Giles encountered production issues early in 2021, as he planned to write and direct Jellyfish with his ECU film school friend producing it. However, Giles had to produce it himself after those plans fell through.
“I was quite a newbie back then, so I didn’t really know anyone else who I could possibly get to do it, especially someone who would commit to an unpaid feature film.”
Besides writing and producing, Giles also ended up shooting and editing the film. He used his friend (with no audio experience) as the sound mixer, and his ECU friends (with minimal acting experience) as unpaid actors, and it surprisingly worked out well.
“I went up to my prospective actors and I was like ‘guys do you want to shoot a movie with me’, and they were like, yeah,” Giles said.
“It was all like working within constraints, and using what you have available, and I have these people available to me, so I use them.”
Giles was thus resourceful in his casting and crew selection, and also carefully chose shooting locations, using mostly public outdoor spaces. However, as with all independent films, the common plight of budgeting was something Giles had to tackle.
“The money from the film didn’t really come from investors or any kind of crowdfunding or anything, it was just my own salary,” Giles said.
“I had to come up with what camera I was going to use, what audio equipment, and just the main expenses and then working out how much I needed to spend.”
With the initial cost around six thousand dollars, and audio equipment alone totalling one thousand dollars, Giles said retrospectively it would’ve been helpful to have found a professional sound mixer to work on Jellyfish.
“That was a learning curve which could’ve saved us some money.” Giles said.
However, Giles said it worked for the best due to potential scheduling conflicts.
“If I was using people I wasn’t as close to I would’ve had to string them along for two years and say, ‘hey can you shoot this day’, or ‘oh, can you drive up here for me’, and for no money you don’t say yes to that.”
It is true that Giles never planned for Jellyfish to take three years to produce. He originally scheduled the shoot to last three months, but university commitments saw him juggle filming and studying.
“I had to schedule around everyone else’s stuff as well, and it ended up being that we didn’t shoot for a whole semester…it actually ended up being postponed for a year.”
It makes sense then, given this extended timeframe, that debut filmmakers must be thick-skinned in the face of such setbacks. Giles said that resilience helped him finish making Jellyfish.
“There were many, many times where I felt like it would be easier just to stop making it,” Giles said.
“At some point I just had to be like ‘oh I should just finish this so I have this movie and I can show people that I made it, instead of ‘oh, this can be worked on until a point where it’s perfect’, which is not going to happen.”
In post-production, Giles also had to navigate promotion of Jellyfish, which, amidst the smaller Perth film circles, was a “major hurdle.”
“You have to turn [the film] into a marketable object, and then you kind of have to think, this is my piece of work, now what about it is enticing to someone, and how do I sell this?”
Giles did hire out a Luna Leederville cinema space to screen the film, which he said was a “good decision”, as it established to audiences the legitimacy of Jellyfish, being shown in a “real cinema.”
So, with Jellyfish a finished product to soon be on the screen, would Giles do it all again, despite the struggles he faced? Yes.
“Making a feature-length film provided a lot of challenges but it also taught many lessons,” Giles said.
“I am actually planning a short film right now, so I can use my experience on Jellyfish to refine what that process is going to look like.
“I’m hoping something fruitful comes out of Jellyfish.”
Jellyfish premieres on Thursday 18th July 6:30pm at Luna Leederville Cinema 1. Tickets are available here.
Jellyfish follows Henry, who is a slacker floating through young adulthood earning a measly income from selling his body as a human punching bag. Meanwhile he wonders if there is more to his stagnating existence than the punches life throws at him.