“Hello, Duke!” was born after a harsh and almost heartbreaking day of filming what Max and I consider to be one of our best short films, “Doppelgängers”.
We planned to shoot “Doppelgängers” over the course of a weekend, so a two-day shoot in total. I was the writer and director of “Doppelgängers” and was just coming off my return-to-directing in July of 2024 with “The Slacker and the Stalker”, so my approach to making a film about three stoners getting attacked by evil versions of themselves was to try to tell a methodically-shot and dialogue-driven masterpiece all while being a step-up from my previous filmmaking effort.
And Day 1 of shooting… sucked. Yeah, it was not fun. The only content present in the final cut of “Doppelgängers” is actually the sequence where Axel (played by Max Jasper) is tackled and killed by his doppelganger. Everything else… yeah, it sucked. And after shooting, Max, and Jaiden all participated in our high school cross country alumni meet, which saw the three of us running about three miles IN ADDITION to shooting half of a short film previously. Oh, and on top of that, we went to Culver’s before we ran the 5K so… that didn’t help us at all. But once we got back to our apartment and looked over the footage, my heart sank upon discovering that all of the audio for the footage we had shot was barely audible. I brought Max into my room and we quickly realized that, in addition to the poor audio quality, the acting and overall mood of the film just was not right. We then decided to dedicate the entirety of our second and final day of shooting on re-shooting the whole film and essentially changing the ending. I’ll perhaps write more about the production of “Doppelgängers” another time, but in summary, Day 2 went excellent, and a few months later, “Doppelgängers” is now one of the best short films on The Nutty House YouTube channel.
But how does “Hello, Duke!” tie into all this malarkey?
Well, on the night of Day 1, Max, Jaiden, and I all went to our apartment’s pool to do what three young adult men do at their apartment’s pool at 11 o’clock at night: GO NUTS. However, since we were all still reeling from the apparent waste of a day of shooting, Max had the idea to film a little S.P.O.O.F (Short Production Only Offering Fun) on my iPhone. We had only done one S.P.O.O.F. before, “Crybaby”, which turned out… okay, I guess? But could Max’s idea to make up for the disappointing day of shooting with an iPhone movie do any harm? No, not really, I suppose.
So Max directed and filmed Jaiden and me playing catch with a ball in the pool and somehow, the two of us (but mostly Max) found a way to turn a game of catch into an apparent encounter with death and a fastball to the groin area of yours truly.
Speaking of which, yes, I legitimately took that shot to the nuts. It honestly didn’t hurt or anything; I was just surprised that Max nailed a perfect shot on like the second or third throw. Also, since Max was still seasoned from his years as a baseball player and Jaiden was… well, he never played any throwing sports in his youth… Max threw the ball while Jaiden filmed.
I then spent the rest of the night editing together a rough cut of “Hello, Duke!” and showed the boys the next morning as we prepared for Day 2 of shooting “Doppelgängers”.
And then… weeks passed. Weeks turned into months. And months… became more months. Only when me and Max had Jaiden back at the apartment to shoot our upcoming short film “Kurt and Waylon” did Jaiden re-spark my interest in finishing “Hello, Duke!”
The true reason why I practically abandoned the project back in August 2024 was because it would be required to be edited on an iPhone via the editing app iMovie. Usually, with the content we shoot with our Canon C100 video camera, I edit from my PC and Adobe Premiere Pro, and which is an absolute blast. But editing on an iPhone… it kind of stinks. Sure, you can get the job done, but it is incredibly tedious and glitchy. Additionally, I decided to focus my iMovie editing efforts on putting the documentary “Northern Country for Old Men” together for its Christmas Eve release date.
But now having Jaiden’s refueled interest in “Hello, Duke!”, I took it upon myself to at least grind out one night to see if I could put something together. And I did not expect that I would end up making the first silent film Brothers Duel has ever produced, but I am very happy I did.
What got me interested in turning “Hello, Duke!” into a silent film were two reasons: 1) There was an extremely loud fan blowing into the pool room so the audio my phone was picking up was just absolutely atrocious, and 2) Max and I recently came up with a similar short film set in the pool area that Max pitched to me as a silent film without dialogue, so I figured I could maybe see if “Hello, Duke!” could be a prototype to that idea.
And it certainly became that! Besides my totally fake moans of agony after being nailed in the nuts, “Hello, Duke!” became the perfect prototype to a potential future Brothers Duel silent film.
I probably wouldn’t consider “Hello, Duke!” one of our best videos made under the Brothers Duel name, but for what it is, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out and that it gets to be another experimental film for me and Max to put under our belts.
As for our future projects, Max and I are soon to embark on our first of two adventures out of the state of Minnesota and we will hopefully be able to get some stuff filmed for future films. But unfortunately for most viewers out there, our content (besides the YouTube shorts) may go on a little hiatus for a while as the two of us focus on developing other projects and submitting a few short films we have already made to film festivals.
To not end on a downer note, here’s a list of projects Max and I are hoping to release to The Nutty House YouTube channel this year:
“Sid” - a short film written, directed, produced, and edited by Max Jasper and starring myself (Luke Rekela) and John Neithercott. This was for a class Max took at Metro State University and it apparently was really well-received by the class. So good for Max.
“Kurt and Waylon” - I’ll likely provide more updates on this project in the coming months, as it is already one of our most interesting Brothers Duel projects.
Untitled Arizona documentary - If you liked “The Old Tetons” and “Northern Country for Old Men”, then the trilogy will be complete with one epic hiking trip to Arizona, as Max and I will be filming and directly collaborating on the editing process of a documentary for the first time.
Thanks for reading and have a pleasant day (or night)!
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