Serial kickers!

From the north-east of England comes Stranger Hero, the central character in an internet serial of the same name produced by Shoot Your Mouth Off, a small company with big ideas and, as they tell Paul Carter, the ambition to reach a wider public

I’d worked in disability arts for a long time and been on the same bill as Mat Fraser and people like that,” says Karen Sheader, a director of disability-led media production company, Shoot Your Mouth Off (SYMO).

Karen formed SYMO after a chance meeting with two filmmakers who happened to be filming a cabaret show she was appearing in while working for an arts organisation in the North East.

“We made our first two films in 2001 and the whole thing kept going. In 2006 we became a proper business, a Community Interest Company, and now the three of us are full-time SYMO members of staff,” she says.

The company produces a wide range of genres, from comedy horror to documentaries, but also material for local authorities. It also runs a group called SYMO Kindling with a group of people with learning difficulties who pool their direct payments or individual budgets to buy digital media or filmmaking services.

Karen says that SYMO’s aims have moved beyond merely banging the drum of equality.

“It probably used to be more political than it is now,” she says. “I think I started off purely from the disability rights perspective, and that’s mellowed over time. It used to be my driving force and now it seems to me, yes, I still want to give disabled people a voice but sometimes it can be quite restrictive. It’s now as much about providing an enjoyable, rewarding, meaningful use of time as it is about actually trying to change things.”

This year the company released the third instalment of its action hero kung-fu serial, Stranger Hero. The second episode featured Mat Fraser appearing alongside the film’s eponymous hero, played by Ged Watts, who has Down’s Syndrome.

“We wanted to create something that people outside of the disability circuit would find intriguing and it came in the form of Ged who’s a handsome, brooding-looking guy with Down’s Syndrome. He’s very athletic like an Olympic athlete, which meant that he could do the fight scenes and make them convincing.

“We wanted to create what we thought would be a poster boy icon out of someone with Down’s Syndrome who’d be the world’s first kung-fu action hero.”

The third episode seeks to show that Stranger Hero has a lighter side, because he’s not actually a very nice character. That was deliberate, because you see people with learning disabilities in films and they’re always cuddly, always endearing, and never taken seriously. We wanted to give Stranger Hero a past, a back story to make him a bit more than two-dimensional.”

Karen says that despite the positive feedback on Stranger Hero, and each episode having several thousand views on YouTube, it’s still far less than lower-quality, non-disabled productions.

“Steve, the guy who conceived the idea and directed it, I think has become massively disillusioned because the view counts are so low, and that’s why we wanted to contact magazines such as yours to try and bring this to people’s attention.

“We’d like to do some more, but only if it can be proved that there’s an audience for it.

“We’ve just got a whole load of new gear, thanks to some funding from the Social Enterprise Investment Fund, so we can do something now that is broadcast quality, we can film in high-definition, so it’s now possible for us to do something that could go on TV. But only if people knew about it, you know?”