Coffee Films came into being in 1996, growing from the ashes of the Naked Pony Theatre Company and Mr. Spambapstic Films.

Naked Pony were a fringe theatre company based in South East England which spent three years producing a series of innovative and acclaimed productions, from European and English classics such as Woyzeck (Georg Buchner), King Lear (William Shakespeare), and La Ronde (Arthur Schnitzler), to their original work Titanic (devised by school children under the supervision of the company).

The performances were particularly notable for their minimal casts (Cyrano de Bergerac, commonly performed with anything up to 200 cast members was stripped down to just 4 actors), huge script edits (King Lear was reduced from 180 minutes to just 90), and remarkable staging (nearly all the plays were performed with a combination of just 3 spotlights and 4 fresnels casting pure white light, combined with a set created by film and slide projectors); the end result was unique, and quite unlike anything else outside of the London fringe.

At the same time in 1996 technical director Steve Piper produced the 4 minute short Televisual Man with friend Dave Smith under the company name Mr. Spambapstic Films. An Orwellian themed experiment shot on S-VHS tape, edited in-camera, and completed in a day it would be 9 years before the public would get a glimpse of the film!

By 1998 artistic director Hadrian Garrard wanted to take Naked Pony a step further, after successful tours of King Lear and Woyzeck the company set out to secure a large grant from the Lottery to enable them to produce an original work with playwright Goran Stefanovski for European touring. The Lottery were having none of it and refused the money (undoubtedly applying it instead to yet another tasteful town centre monument); disillusioned, Garrard proclaimed that theatre was dead as an artform, and company assets were sold to fund a film short of King Lear, the intention being to move the company on into film production.

Shortly after completing the film Garrard moved on to a successful music career playing with Ed Harcourt, whilst Piper settled into a corporate marketing day job, moved house, and started organising his own film production team Coffee Films. Made largely out of friends who mostly had little or no previous arts or film experience, the original intention of the company was to show that literally anyone could have a go at making films; huge budgets, film schools, special effects and stars weren't as important as a tight knit team with plenty of determination.

The changing Coffee logo, all versions by Steve Piper

1998 was a highly productive year; producing ten experimental film shorts, animated sequences, and documentaries. By 1999, inspired by the guerilla film-making acheivements of Rodriguez and feeling confident, the team started working towards shooting a feature length film, determined to create a project that could work superbly artistically and commercially, and still all with no budget. Three feature length scripts were completed, and shooting repeatedly started, however, it became clear that scheduling around the entire cast and crew's day job commitments was a virtual impossibility, and all three projects ended up on the shelf.

In 2002 shooting began on a final no budget short (Dealer) for release to festivals and Internet streaming sites, a few months later the wonderful How To Disappear Completely script landed in our mailbox all the way from Canada; amazing opportunities began appearing on the horizon in droves. Towards the end of the year the first board of directors was established with Piper as managing director, television QC Rob Fairlie as technical director, and entertainment lawyer Vanda Rapti as director of legal and business affairs, occasional contributor Gelli Graham also signed up with the specific duty to set up a sister artist management company (Coffee Artists), and the rest of the original team stayed on board as shareholders fulfilling an array of roles from acting to location scouting.

The company was officially incorporated early on in 2003 as Coffee Arts and Media Ltd, and by 2004 How To Disappear Completely was touring the world's film festivals and gained the company recognition as one of Europe's best young production teams from an independent jury formed by MIFED and the Italian National School of Cinema. The film's success has kept it on the screening circuit ever since alongside a series of other dramatic shorts which now help to establish a range of exciting young talents, and opened up opportunities developing feature screenplays for US producers and shooting music documentaries and videos for artists on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2005 Last of the Scottish Wildcats, a documentary on Britain's rarest mammal and only wild cat, went into production and surprised most by successfully capturing unique footage of an animal only the BBC had previously successfully filmed. Introducing the company to the high end wildlife and current affairs market a new slate developed and is now well into talks with some of the world's most respected broadcasters, pointing to a second decade as one of the industry's most diverse and surprising independent producers.

Coffee Films are at a screen near you now, and should be at quite a few more in the near future.

Articles

Article from UK local industry organisation Mediatree in February 2006
Article from UK Magazine Aesthetica in November 2005

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