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Steve Piper
Director/Producer/Writer Company Director
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Steve was born in Kent in 1976 and lived in the town of Sittingbourne for most of his youth, spending most of his younger years reading, drawing and writing comics with a small team of friends. As he progressed into his teens the comics moved towards graphic design for local companies and events, and throughout GCSE's and A levels he gained an interest in music and band management, learning guitar and piano and singing in one of the bands that performed at the opening of the Channel Tunnel.
Whilst all this was going on Piper had convinced his school's new drama teacher that he had been running the technical side of the drama department for several years, and proceeded to crew up the majority of the school's layabouts who soon learned that the excuse "I have to work on the play set" could get them out of pretty much anything and provided access to numerous disused storerooms for cigarette breaks. Something about it worked though and the school enjoyed several years of highly creative work from it's stage crew whilst putting up with the noisy array of backstage "sports" that were developed each year during pre-production.
Leaving school Piper lucked a job as a combination of stage manager, production manager, technical designer and technical producer for the Naked Pony Theatre Company. Based in South East England the company performed a wide variety of acclaimed plays but, constantly underfunded, they eventually voluntarily folded after three years of touring and residential work in an array of bizarre spaces across the south of England. It was during these theatre years that Coffee Films was born, if only in spirit, with Piper producing Televisual Man with Dave Smith in 1996 under the production company name of Mr. Spambapstic Films.
As 1998 rolled around and Naked Pony wrapped things up by filming a short of one of their plays, Steve spent some time in club promotion before deciding on film as his next project, and finally got himself a 'real job' with a marketing company in Kent to pay the bills. One of the area's largest employers, the company provided a mass of people to recruit and enough money to work through a series of debauched houseshares with many of the Coffee faithful.
The next few years were spent experimenting with films, networking and learning about feature screenplay writing; three feature projects were started and eventually shelved proving too ambitious for their absolutely zero budgets. Commitments now as an executive at the marketing company were also taking over; handling clients such as Coca Cola, American Express, Nintendo and The Royal Bank of Scotland was sucking up increasing amounts of time. Fortune smiled down though, the marketing company relocated and Piper was more than happy to accept a big chunk of redundancy money and have another crack at Coffee Films.
Focusing on the more acheiveable short form Piper pulled in his regular contributors and kicked off the experimental Dealer project, whilst also working hard promoting the company on the independent scene to try and attract stronger scripts and more experienced talent. By 2004 the hard work started to pay off; Coffee Arts and Media was an incorporated company and included not only Coffee Films, but a new music agency Coffee Artists, and web design arm Coffee Internet (later to develop into a general design company Coffee Design). Meanwhile the company's first DV short How To Disappear Completely began it's substantial run of festivals and screenings (still going three years later), netting Piper an award as one of Europe's most exciting emerging young filmmakers.
Never happy to take a logical career direction in 2005 Piper shot two documentaries on emerging US music acts signed to Coffee Artists, helped write a feature length US children's film and combined that with a developing interest in wildlife and love for cats to come to the decision to independently shoot Last of the Scottish Wildcats with a few thousand pounds in sponsorship money and the good wishes of Visa. Not taken entirely seriously by everyone 18 months later he wrapped only the second film ever to be completed on a cat of which less than 400 remain in the most remote wilderness in Britain.
Piper lives with his girlfriend Gelli, cat Coffee and dog Baron in Kent, and is currently working on a wide slate of wildlife documentary and feature strands to the Coffee Films organisation as well as squeezing in design for Coffee Design, a lot of boring paperwork for Coffee Artists, support for emerging filmmakers through university talks and the BBC Film Network Industry Panel and duties as a trustee of the newly formed Scottish Wildcat Association; he rarely sleeps.
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Biog at BBC Film Network |
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