LOCAL  film makers Dean Hewison and Richard Falkner believe the best stimulus for their creativity lies in restriction.
During a creative partnership spanning five years there’s not much they haven’t tried, whether it’s scouring the dump shop for potential props or building a robot in Dean’s driveway. This year they’re competing in the Make My Movie project hoping to grab $100,000 for their latest project Stalking: How to Meet Girls From a Distance.  Of the 757 entries received for the MMM project, the Wellington pair are one of only 12 teams remaining in the competition.
Their partnership was born out of a mutual love of writing and a passion for storytelling. The two have fond memories of their various projects: “(for Hypnotastic) we spent a month in my driveway, building robots,” Hewison says. “We went to the dump shop and we were going through all this stuff, we’d pick up stuff and go ‘does this look like a robot to you?’ We ended up making the robot out of a desk lamp, little tank and alarm clock.”
They consider the restrictions to be opportunities,  “Parameters are useful … if at the start of 48Hours they said come back and make a seven minute film about anything, using anything you’d just sit there for ages like ‘anything!? I’ve got too many ideas!’ Instead they say ‘ok, you’ve got to use a coat hanger and it’s got to be a musical’ so suddenly you’ve got images in your head,” Hewison says.
The two use each other’s feedback to determine which ideas are best. “If it’s working we get more and more enthusiastic. It’s a good filter, we come up with ideas and if it gets through both of our good taste/bad taste humour filters then we know we’re sort of onto something,” Falkner says.
The pleasure in is the process of storytelling.
“It’s telling a story in a way that hasn’t been told before” says Hewison.
Falkner  agrees:  “We’re hungry to tell stories in film, by hell or high-water we’re going to keep trying to do that.”
Their project How to Meet Girls is one of the few comedies in the finalists. It’s a romantic comedy about a guy who likes to be “prepared” before introducing himself to a girl.
The winner of the MMM project will be decided by public vote and revealed on January 26. The team will then have $100,000 and just two months to produce their feature film, to be premiered in April 2012.
- Elizabeth Beattie and Niels Reinsbor