ACCORDING to Richard DeDomenici the end of his Redux Project will either result in him being sued by Hollywood or them employing him.

"There's no grey area," he smiles. "It will either be one or the other."

Judging by the response to it so far, I'm taking a bet on the latter.

Although from Watford and based, artistically speaking, at the Toynbee Studios in Aldgate, London, the performance artist will be more than a familiar face to Colchester residents thanks to his long association with Colchester Arts Centre and its director Anthony Roberts.

"I first met Anthony at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow," Richard explains. "I was selling my little books of arts and he bought a whole load off me. Then a couple of weeks later he called me up and give me my first commission, which ended up being the £300 Show."

Given £300 and just 24 hours to spend it, the show involved Richard explaining to his audience the next day just what he had done with the money.

"It was quite controversial," he tells me. "We ended up going on the Today Programme just before the Vice President of Zimbabwe trying to justify the whole thing as art to John Humphreys."

And controversy continued to follow Richard with another piece of art which consisted of him trying to prove it was possible to fire one of the cannons from Edinburgh Castle to blow up the new Scottish Parliament and then of course there was the Olympic Torch Relay.

"It started with the Beijing Olympics when some people started to protest the torch relay," he says. "I wanted to do something that was a little more ambiguous, so people would see me and wonder whether I was protesting or whether I was a part of the procession itself. For the 2012 relay I expanded it to various towns and cities such as Norwich, Brighton and Colchester.

"The trick was to position myself behind the sponsors but just in front of the torch itself."

Subverting the iconic symbol of the Olympic Movement is nothing to what Richard has done with his Redux Project, effectively taking on Hollywood at it's own game, creating fake snippets of movies, which are themselves fake.

The Redux Project both celebrates and subverts the cinematic heritage of the places it visits, by attempting to make shot-for-shot remakes of scenes from famous movies, on a shoe-string budget with amateur local crews, in the same locations where the originals were filmed.

Richard says: "It all started in April 2009 when I was on my way by train to Hamburg to attend the Aircraft Interiors Expo.

"I had some spare time at Gare De L’Est station in Paris, so decided to attempt to remake a section of the film Amelie, which had been filmed on the steps outside.

"Two years later, at Berlin's Ostbahnhof station, I recognised a location from one of the Bourne films. By now I had embraced the smartphone revolution, and so was able to find the clip on YouTube, and make a shot-for-shot remake of what is admittedly the most boring 60 seconds of The Bourne Supremacy.

"At home I edited the footage together using a fancy new bit of editing software. I was able to place the original footage alongside my own, and colour grade it in such a way as it looked quite similar.

"This was not yet a conscious art project, merely something to occupy my time whilst waiting at foreign train stations.

"However, when Forest Fringe asked me in 2012 if I had any ideas for a project at the Scala Cinema in Bangkok, I decided to revisit this shot-for-shot/original location idea."

And so in early 2013 Richard remade six minutes of the highest grossing movie in Thailand in 2009: Bangkok Traffic Love Story.

"I made the last-minute decision to play the lead," he adds, "and the rest of the cast and crew were recruited locally.

"When we weren’t filming I was busy editing, and we showed daily rushes in a production office at the cinema. It was very ambitious to find the locations, shoot and edit the footage in four days, although we saved time by filming without permission, which meant we often only had a single take.

"On the final night of the festival, and with minutes to spare, we screened the finished edit at The Scala. Wise Kwai, film critic for The Nation newspaper, wrote that he liked our version more than the original."

And it's not the only 'Redux' of Richard's that has done better than the original.

"To reduce costs, several of the scenes from Cloud Atlas set in 1973 San Francisco were actually filmed in Glasgow," Richard says. "I noticed this because many were filmed along the route I used to walk to the Arches when I used to perform at the National Review of Live Art, albeit heavily augmented with CGI to look more Californian.

"It was these two and a half minutes of 1973 San Francisco street scenes that we remade over 48 hours at the Buzzcut Festival in March 2013. It was the most ambitious Redux yet, involving multiple actors, stunts, props, guns, car crashes, broken glass, and freezing winds.

"I screened the finished edit at the end of Buzzcut, and a reviewer from The Scotsman gave it a four star review, which is noteworthy as that's one star more that the newspaper gave to the actual film Cloud Atlas."

Since then The Redux Project has taken Richard all over the world, to Sydney to film a scene from the Matrix and Seoul where his version of Avengers: Age of Ultron included South Korean movie idol Uhm Ji Won.

He also took part in the BBC's celebration of its Television Centre with his own Redux, among others, of the Blue Peter episode where the elephant stood on John Noakes foot, complete with a very familiar figure playing the elephant's keeper, a certain Anthony Roberts.

"I only applied to take part to impress a girl," he jokes, "but I think my project really ticked all their boxes in that it was site specific and in essence responded to that site. I had never done anything on that scale before and in the days leading up to the live broadcast the technical rehearsals were a disaster. Fortunately on the night itself the gods were looking down on us and it could not have gone better."

Richard DeDomenici: The Redux Project

Colchester Arts Centre,

Church Street, Colchester.

Wednesday, doors 7.30pm.

Pay what you can. 01206 500900.

www.colchesterartscentre.com