Christopher Rithin

As one half of Wolfpack Productions, what do you do?
I do everything. I am executive producer for Wolfpack; I am the main editor, DoP [Director of Photography] and line producer. I don’t direct – that’s the only thing I don’t do. But name a job title and I’ve probably done it.

Do you write?
No, I don’t write any more. When Wolfpack started, it was me and Jay and we wanted to write something together, so we did and I enjoyed that. But then, when we got to #Sketchpack, we got a team of writers, and we were helping each other write, and that’s fantastic. But for me, because I’m doing so many other things – I can be focused on pre-production, the post, marketing, everything – I was like, ‘I need to stop doing stuff.’ It’s a passion of mine and I enjoy doing it; the first episode of Outside The Box was all me, and I loved it and it was great. So now I enjoy creating on any level, but writing and directing I’ve left to other people.

I’m really enjoying getting behind the camera and learning about DoP and really getting behind that, loving that. Editing: I always had an eye for it and always enjoyed it. So yeah, when you put everything together when you’re making something, I end up doing everything, from pre to post.

Was that a conscious decision? Because it sounds like you fell into all of that out of necessity.
I’m going to say it was probably a bit of both. It wasn’t a moment of, ‘I’m going to make this and I’m going to do everything.’ It was more, ‘I want to do this, so let’s get other people in to do those jobs.’ And then they were useless, so I was like, ‘I know I can do that better.’ For example, we got someone in to do the special effects for Outside The Box. What he did was great, but it wasn’t what we needed or wanted, and we needed it faster. So I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ So I did, and you end up getting into a rhythm, and because you’re working with certain people that know your rhythms, we realised that, actually, we could do it as it is, so why not carry on?

I’m a bit of a workaholic, I suppose, so I’m not shy to it. I like to go into my world and start creating, so I always make life very difficult for myself.

How have you taken to the producer role? From my experience, and anecdotally, that’s usually the steepest learning curve for creators.
On the producer side of things, yes, same thing: I had to fall into that because that needed doing. Everything else was out of necessity, and because I enjoyed it. But I am becoming known now as a producer, rather than anything else.

How do you feel about that?
I used to be ashamed. As an actor, I had this prejudice against actors that stopped being actors. Now, I’m not stopping being an actor. But I had this idea that if you fall into doing something else it means you’d failed, and I never wanted to appear that I’d failed as an actor, that I couldn’t possibly do anything else.

Because we had the finances to do it, being a producer wasn’t that bad; it was actually quite cool.

But there would be lots of times where I’d be like, ‘no, I produced it, but I’m the main actor in it.’ Outside the Box was supposed to be for us as actors, not for us to become producers.

However, since then, I found that I like the work, so I’m not ashamed of it any more. I’m quite proud of it, and I’ve learnt through growing up a little bit that you can still be an actor and a producer and it’s ok.

But you started as an actor. What got you into acting?
No one ever asks me this question!

Like any seven year old boy, I was into magic. My Mum bought me this magic tricks book. I was going through it, and I was learning but I wasn’t very good. At the end of the book, it said that 90% of the trick is not the trick, it’s the performance that does it. A lightbulb went on; I suddenly thought, ‘well, that’s the bit I like: I don’t like the magic trick – the magic trick’s crap – it’s the being in front of people and the performance that I like.’ And that was it.

Where did you grow up?
I was born in Bournemouth but I grew up in north Wales. I say I’m Welsh because I moved there when I was two, so all I know is Wales.

Is it as rural as us southerners think it is?
Yup, rural, small town; one of the villages I lived in growing up had three streets and a Post Office that shut down because of lack of business.

My parents wanted me to do something outside of school. They didn’t want me to become one of those yobbos that do nothing, because there’s nothing to do. So I did everything: I did swimming, scouts, naval cadets, gymnastics, learned to play the clarinet and joined the orchestra… everything.

And I didn’t enjoy any of it.

Then I did something in school – a play – and my Dad asked me one day, ‘how was that?’ And I was like, ‘yeah, I like that, I really like that.’ So we got home, got out the Yellow Pages, and they put me into amateur dramatics.

And from then on, everything in my life has been driven from that: all the courses I did at school, and then college where I did a BTEC National Diploma in performing arts. I also did AS Physics and failed it. I got a U – I did so badly, but I got a triple distinction in performing arts, so you tell me what I was supposed to do.

So everything was moving towards acting, and then at 18, what do you do? You go to London. I moved here as soon as I finished my course. I learnt everything from scratch. I went to ArtsEd (the Arts Educational School in Chiswick, London) but I didn’t finish the course.

Ok, here’s a little gossip for you. Everyone thinks that when I say I went to drama school that I was doing a degree course. This is not true, and you are the first person to have asked, so this is an exclusive right now: I was doing a one year foundation course in musical theatre – not the degree course.

In musical theatre!?
In musical theatre. Yes. Oh yeah, I went to drama school in Chiswick but I didn’t finish the course because it’s not what I wanted to do – that’s the story I tell. The real story is that I didn’t know what I could do; my college, bless them, were so bad that we didn’t get our results until six or seven months after everyone else, so I couldn’t apply to go anywhere else because I didn’t have my results.

What!? But you need your paperwork to go through clearing and UCAS and all of that…
Exactly. So I moved to London and I had to wait until the next year before I could apply to go anywhere. I had to do something, and I was like, ‘well, I don’t know whether I’m good enough yet.’ So I auditioned for this foundation course, because you could. I got in, and I was in musical theatre and I hated it.

I know they’re famous for it, but were you musically inclined when you were in Wales?
Yes. Singing is part of Wales. You grow up and you’re in a choir, so it’s in your blood. I loved it, I enjoyed musical theatre, but I have a problem with both authority and education.

Don’t you need both of those if you’re on a musical theatre course?
Yes, but I couldn’t do it. And here’s the straw that broke the camel’s back: they got us all into a room and they told us, ‘guys, you don’t really need drama school – we just polish off the skills you already have.’ So I was like, ‘ok, I see where you’re going with this – you’re just finishing off the job so to speak – but what am I paying you for?’

So that was it, I was done.

But that was before I found film. I didn’t know about film at the time. I didn’t know the first thing about acting in film, or in London, or where I needed to go, how to network or any of that.

Did you know anyone here when you moved to London?
No one. I spent the first three months alone. I had work – I worked at Fortnum & Mason – but you don’t get on with people at work straight away. So I just went home and cried. My first ever agent was from Wales, and she was breaking out from doing background agency into actors’ agency. She was thrilled that I was moving to London, but one evening, I actually called her in tears saying, ‘I just need to speak to someone, and she was like, ‘are you drunk?!’

At the time, I was eighteen and alone and scared in London, somewhere I’d loved the idea of since I was three. So you start learning on the internet, you start researching and finding out how to do it.

I also joined a background agency. I needed more money at the time, and I figured it was film and I needed some access to that world. I met someone on a job who recommended an acting class, and that’s where I met some of my first friends in London. The acting class did a networking event once a month as well and that was a good introduction to everything.

If I could do it all again, I’d do it completely differently because I know so much now, but at the time I was doing it all blind.

What year was that?
It was 2004; it was only 2008/9 that I started doing short films because it got to a point where I needed a showreel so I started doing student films. Then I started getting roles, getting better agents, and everything started to get better and better.

It was a rocky road for the first six or seven years though.

And then you ended up doing Harry Potter.
This one came out of left field a bit. It’s such a small role, but it was a huge opportunity.

I went to the studios and we did an audition; there were about 30 other people there. It was a much more interactive audition than anything else I’d done. And they said, ‘ok, pair up, give us some emotions: you’re afraid, you’re angry, you’re gossiping about the other guys,’ stuff like that. Then yes, I got that role: Dudley’s gang in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I only did that one film, but I did actually go back and do some behind the scenes work for them. I did a lot of stuff on bluescreen, and greenscreen activities.

When they fall into the atrium, they hover and then they land, and dust flies; well, that dust is me in a blue Lycra suit holding a blue plank of wood in front of a blue screen hitting a pile of dust. I did that for a couple of weeks for them, and it was great doing lots of little behind the scenes things.

It also gave me a good grounding. You get a lot of attention, and the Potter fans are wonderful and amazing; they can be very passionate, which can be overwhelming, and that took my by surprise because I wasn’t a significant character in any respect. But because I was on Twitter talking to them, they really responded to that. So I suddenly got this following because I was talking to people.

How did you go from Potter to your next thing?
Well, then you settle into the rhythm of being an actor. You go to audition after audition after audition. You don’t get anything, and then you get a little job, and that’s great, but it doesn’t affect you in any way, and then you get another thing.

And then you get an opportunity. So there were these guys with a film: a low budget film, but it’s a film, and you’re auditioning for one of the lead actors.

I did this film called Axed. It was a Casting Call Pro audition in the back of a library or a bookshop, and they didn’t want to go through agents because they couldn’t afford it. It had a wonderful concept: this Dad loses his job, goes crazy and takes his family into the woods and kills them. So I auditioned, got the role and spent a month filming in the Lake District. That was 2009, two years after Potter.

For about four or five years, I did a film every year. My second film I did was called Taco. It’s a Czech film, and they wanted English actors to do these English-speaking roles in this rally race. Each country had their own team and they were speaking their own language within this film. Then they’d have Czech subtitles for that bit. It was a comedy. It was amazing: we were driving rally cars and we spent the whole month in the Czech Republic filming everything.

So when did you meet Jay?
I met Jay on the set of Convention of the Dead. We filmed it in 2012/3. We were filming in Bournemouth for a month. It’s a low budget indie film so they were using the hotel where we filmed as our base. Because me, Jay and this other guy, Andy, were sharing a room – it was the director’s idea because they needed us to be best friends overnight –

And it’s cheaper!
Funnily enough, I think that probably did cross their minds! But in the end, it worked out because we became best friends. Then Ashleigh Lawrence was also there, and Ash became the other person in our group.

The Hangover had just been released, and of course, the ‘wolfpack’ was all over that.

Ah, so that’s where the name came from?
Yes. One thing about the crew that was wonderful was that they were all close to each other, and they had someone who was doing Health & Safety who was the Dad of one of the producers, so it was a tight knit group. He had a wonderful air about him, and he had such a way with words. So in the H&S contract, it said, ‘No revelling or fun after certain hours’ [for respect of the other guests staying in the hotel at the same time].

Because we were doing night shoots, at the end of a working day, any person would go, ‘let’s get a drink’; thing is, at the end of our working day, it was 5am, and we’d still want a drink. But to all the other residents getting up at 6am, we’re now this drunken group in the corner in the morning. We called it ‘pre-breakfast revelling’ and we’d go into Bournemouth. We actually went swimming in the sea one morning / evening; it was October and freezing.

We got along great, and we became known as ‘the wolfpack’ within this film.

So after the filming, Jay was still in Bristol, Ash was looking for a new flat anyway, and we thought about trying to find a flat together. So we found a place in London and all moved in together.

In September 2013, I couldn’t sleep. I had this nagging idea. Jay and I wanted to do more, we were getting frustrated with our careers, so I thought, ‘Wolfpack Productions – why don’t we do it? Why don’t we make stuff together?’ Ashleigh was into marketing, so she could manage that side of things, and Jay and I could do the creative and management things. They loved it, and thankfully, they both went for it.

Ashleigh is now retired from acting and the industry but, as you know, we’ve come a bit of a way since then.

Where did the idea for Outside The Box come from?
I had already started editing some showreels for a few friends, and I had gotten this footage from a producer. He just needed me to log the footage, but because I already had it, and I was trying to learn how to edit, I was using that footage for my own personal learning; for example, what would happen if I put this music behind it – basic things, but just really learning.

It was all well and good having this footage, but I needed to learn how to write something and create that footage so that I could put that into an edit. So I thought I was just going to do something for me, and I wrote this little two minute scene, where two characters would bounce from one location to another to get back to the first point, so I could learn about special effects and transitioning.

And that was all that was. Because I’m into comedy, I thought I’d make it funny. So I called the characters Jay and Chris, and they had this device where they could only go to three places in the world. Jay would get really excited and not understand that it can’t go anywhere else. And that was it: that was the joke.

We were only supposed to film it so I could practice special effects. That’s all it was, it wasn’t supposed to go anywhere.

But at the time, we were trying to figure out what to do and what our first project was supposed to be. Jay was taking classes as a writer at the time, and he fell in love with these characters that I had created, and that was the first episode of Outside The Box.

How do you move from doing something that was only supposed to be a practice piece for you to making the official selection at Raindance?
Well, I guess that’s the beauty of this industry! Jay liked the characters, and we were figuring out how to bring Ashleigh in so this could be a three person thing. So we thought we’d make episodes where, in each one, it’s set-up, joke, out – short, two minute things.

So you always knew it was going to be episodic?
Yes, because we looked at the first episode and we knew that that was a format – we liked it, it worked, so we wanted to recreate that in all the others. Six episodes: let’s do it with an invention in every episode! So suddenly, Red Dwarf is becoming a massive influence in our thinking. So how do we bring in a third character when the episodes are so short, and the first episode has already established two main characters? I know: why doesn’t my character build the third character so then we can bring her in?

This is where Jay and I learnt how to write with each other. Jay wanted more of a story arc and a journey for the characters, and my way of writing is that I’ll just have them in a situation and the story will write itself. I struggle with working with the writers because I don’t see an end point; for me, if I put two characters together, their personalities will create the story of where they’re going. I don’t know if that translates, but that’s how I see it.

So I’m going, ‘we don’t need a journey: can we just put them in different episodes and situations?’ But Jay didn’t want that, he wanted more of an arc. So we went back to basics, and before we shot it, we re-wrote the first episode to include Evil Alice, which would be the Easter egg for the final episode when she turns up, and you find out that she’s been jealous of Clive and following his inventions and stealing them, and things go missing throughout.

And suddenly, we had this thing. Now, I was very fortunate to have had this job: I did an advert for Snickers that aired globally for two years, and I got paid a lot of money for it. So I had financing for our first project.

We had a script, we had financing, we had a great team, and we thought, ‘let’s make it.’ So we did. We paid everyone, and we spent a lot of money.

And I kind of regret that because, if I had that money now, I’d know what to do with it. And it’s really a kick in the teeth. But I wouldn’t have learnt how to get here if I hadn’t had that first project. The budget was about £2k in the end.

After we filmed it, we then had to do something with it. Now, I had always wanted to go to Raindance; I didn’t even know about other web festivals, but I knew that Raindance had one and I wanted to finish this in time. So we filmed it in March, edited by May, submitted it and it was accepted.

So then you met everyone. What was it like coming from your first show – just you guys – to meeting other creators at different levels from all around the world?
Well, it was an eye opener, and it made us realise how much we had to learn, and how maybe blind we were to the whole thing. If it wasn’t for Raindance, I wouldn’t have been able to re-focus my energies on the next one to make sure we did stuff right.

One of the other things we got at Raindance was that everyone was talking about content: you need to release constant content, you need to build your audience, you need to build a relationship with them, you need to talk to them… overload! But we needed to make stuff regularly to prove that we could do it, and we needed a team.

Every actor will have a massive group of friends that are all actors, that are all bored and that want to do something. A lot of them can write, a lot of them can direct, so we thought we’d get them all together.

And that was the very first meeting of #Sketchpack: seven of us all wanting to make something else.

We found that Outside The Box was intense, and we needed something we could turn over quite quickly. So we decided to make sketches.

But #Sketchpack has ended up being more than just us making sketches. Because I didn’t want to go down the road of finding a DoP every week, I decided that I would just do it.

And then sound! Sound is the most important position in film, and because there are so few sound technicians, they charge you a massive amount of money, and we don’t know that many that would do it for free every week. And we knew that we would film two sketches every Sunday for three months. So how do we do that? Well, I had equipment so we’ll teach them, and I know the basics, so if you want to act, then you have to do crew.

Then we did this rota system and it worked beautifully. Because we needed more actors, we’ve now grown to this crew of 27 people that I email every week to find out who is available.

We have writers’ meetings every month where as many of us as possible get together and we go through the sketches and give notes back to the writer. And then we go in pre-production.

In the first series, we did two sketches every Sunday for three months and then we decided to release them six weeks in. And I did everything and I nearly destroyed myself, but we did it every week.

There was a period there in the middle where we were filming, I was editing, we were releasing, we were prepping and we were re-writing all at the same time.

And no one watched them. We didn’t have our marketing in place because we hadn’t learnt that yet. We had the content down, it was so hard, but hey, we figured, let’s keep going.

So second season syndrome kicked in. I had to work this year, I couldn’t take three months off work to edit. So we thought, let’s make it the whole year, and let’s slow down the process a bit. So as long as we film two sketches a month, we can release them every two weeks.

So another thing with Wolfpack is that we’re a strong believer in diversity and equality. Jay’s on it when it comes to casting every single time. London Living is one of our first sketches, and by fluke, only girls were available for the cast. It was originally a male-female couple going to see an estate agent, which we stereotypically made a man in our heads. But only girls were available, so we turned around and said, ‘is that a problem? Let’s just have them do it, and let’s not make it a thing.’

None of the girls were writing at that point, and at the time, there was a lot of stuff around where are all the female writers and directors, so we turned around to our group and went, why don’t you want to write? So they started writing and we suddenly discovered these new voices, and although #Sketchpack is all comedy, it’s not just all one kind of comedy.

You’ve now built up this company; what’s the next level up for Wolfpack?
We’d like to bridge that gap between independently releasing online to releasing for tv and film. We’d like that to be the next step. My end game for Wolfpack is to be an independent production company on a commercial level, where we’re making stuff for channels or cinema.

Web series are wonderful; I’ve always said that they’re like short films in that you can prove that you can do something episodic and interesting, where short films help you prove that you can do a film, then tv and feature. And I see no reason why we can’t do both.

We have enough momentum going to bring us to the next level. I’m pretty confident in our capabilities, with our team, their skills and talent. And everyone’s ready for it.