The Filming of "The King Who Sought Immortality", part one.

We shot all of the live-action material for this film in one single day, most of it indoors in front of a blue screen. It was all a strange mix of strict discipline and a cavalcade of dirty jokes. There were three people in front of the camera; Dag, who played the king of the story, Liz, who portrayed the godess Ishtar, and Rolf, who played the one man in existence who had cracked the secret of immortality. I stayed behind the camera with Björn and Niklas, who were our grips. They later turned into exiled princes during our evening shoot in a deserted sand-pit. More about that in a coming blog.

My costume-maker Liz Matsson, this time IN costume as the godess Ishtar. If she looks a bit shiny here it's because she's covered in fine gold powder. When the film is edited she will have the color of her eyes changed to purple (probably) and a hazy glow will envelope her.

Our very simple set-up. My blue screen is a 4 x 4 meter long / wide cloth and hangs over a big screen, used for making temporary walls during stage plays. The blue cloth is lit by a couple of stage lamps and some lights on the cieling.

Rolf Berg; the man who's been in almost all of my film projects. I realized that this film is our 10th film together! Rolf turns 79 on January 1 2009.

Oh, the joys of adolescent humor! Björn, actor and grip, tries to impress the women with his big tentacle.

I had made a paper "flame drum" for an earlier project and I decided to use it again for a scene in this project. Basically, it's a paper tube with flame-shaped holes covered with red and yellow acetates. You turn the drum and shine light through it, thus achieving the effect of moving "fire" showing against your preferred background. However, we ended up not using it on this film and Dag decided to wear it on his head between takes. Don't really know why.

Dag is holding a tentacle of an attacking octopus. He just chopped it off with his copper sword (actually made out of plastic). He's also holding his breath and pretending he's on the ocean floor. We used a graden leaf-blower to simulate wind in clothes during the filming and we also used it for these faux underwater scenes, to make hair and cloth wave around a bit. It made a hell of a racket while we used it, though.

Niklas is holding the leaf-blower that provided a little wind for us this day. You can stop holding your breath now, Dag. We've stopped filming.

The Mewlips

As a huge Tolkien fan I also became an instant fan of Colin Rudd's music, since I believe it's the closest to sitting in an Middle-Earth inn and listening to a bard as we'll ever get. So I contacted him in June 2007 and asked for permission to use one of his songs, which illustrated Tolkien's "hobbit" poem "The Mewlips", to make a movie. He heartly agreed and off I was to the workshop and animation room... And I was pretty much off for a long while. All sorts of other jobs and problems to solve popped up one by one, so it's not until last week that this project was finished and posted on YouTube. Happily, Colin was happy with the result and now I'm working on the next project, "Ent Song".

The Mewlips are nasty creatures that hobbit parents scare their children with, so the kids don't wander off with foolish ideas of adventure. I had no idea how the puppets would look as I started sculpting them, but here's how they turned out.

Armatures for the puppets were made in my usual, cheap-but-sturdy way. The joints are braided aluminum wire and the "bones" are melted and shaped Friendly Plastic.

One of the mewlips has been covered in latex skin.

But his butt and back still needs to get dressed. As you can see there's some simple muscle shapes made out of foam rubber. The yellow sort is the softer one.

The boys are finished and ready to get moving.

The castle of the mewlips does not suffer any rodent-infestation, but rather an infestation of mudskippers. This tiny puppet is about 8 cm long and was animated separately on a blue screen set, so I could shrink it down when adding it to scenes with the mewlips. Had I built it in scale with the mewlip puppets it would've been pretty difficult to animate.

Dracula on the stage

I was contacted by my friend Lars Åkerlund in the fall of 2007 about making props for his stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. I knew I wouldn't want to miss out on that, since Lars always manages to do clever, funny and thought-provoking stuff. This was not going to be any ordinary Dracula. And quite right I was. The whole stage is draped in black and the whole show is staged by candle light only. Lars, his daughter Maja and my friend Malin acts out all the roles in various ingenious ways. The play premiered in October 2008 and has been playing to great reviews.

My job was to make 23 vampire skulls, one for each show. This version of the tale ends with van Helsing smashing Dracula's skull after the vampire has disintigrated in the sun. The skulls were cast in SmoothCast 325 plastic from a silicone mold. Each skull was cast as thin a hollow plastic layer as it was possible to make it, without breaking the skull while wriggling it out of the mold. It worked most of the time.

A model of Dracula's castle. It can be seen in the background and originally the vampire's eyes were supposed to peek out through the gate as he welcomes Jonathan Harker. But that idea was eventually scrapped. The castle is actually made out of stiff cardboard, covered in latex skins for the stone-wall textures. It was done VEEERY cheaply and quickly, but it does the trick on the candle-lit stage.

Prince Dracula's dragon helmet, here modeled by my pal Martin. The helmet is also made in SmoothCast 325 plastic. The play starts off in medieval times, before Dracula was made a vampire and the helmet was meant to mirror the monster he later becomes. The real life Dracula was a knight of the Order of the Dragon.

I also made two stick-puppet rats with glowing eyes, the poster, the program and various other stuff.

Film project 3: Slayers of Evil

Besides Goblin Wood and The King Who Sought Immortality, which were pretty much unplanned, there was actually a planned film project for the summer of 2008: Slayers of Evil. This film came out of a nostalgic yearning to go back to the roots of fantasy role-playing. I'm old enough to remember when the wizards of Dungeons & Dragons hade pointy hats and the elves looked like Errol Flynn's Robin Hood. I wanted to make a film in celebration of that style, and so wanted my LARP pal Martin Merkel.























We put our heads together to make a humorous quest fantasy, and quickly decided on a trio of heroes; The wizard, the elf and the barbarian princess. A dwarf was, of course, also obligatory, but we eventually skipped him. My old amateur video buddy Rolf Berg would play the wizard, Martin would dress up in tights as the elf, and acting and dancer friend Malin Hermansson would fill out the scant outfit of the barbarian princess. My workmate Agneta Rapp-Svennson was also added as a pseudo-evil sorceress.



The filming was spread out over a period of three days, and everything went surprisingly well. The entire project was shot against a blue screen, so fanciful landscapes and gloomy dungeons can be added behind the actors. Not to mention enable them to interact easier with hordes of animated monsters. Yes; there will be goblins, sword-wielding skeletons, trolls, things with tentacles and other assorted beings with scales, teeth and claws. Stay tuned, kids, stay tuned!

Film project 2: The King Who Sought Immortality

This film I had been wanting to make for some time. I concieved the idea around Christmas last year, as a project with simple props, telling a mythological story with a voice-over, storyteller style. Eventually I decided to use the end of the Gilgamesh epic and compose a tale of my own with some kind of morale at the end of it. The finished script had a nameless king seeking the one man who had achieved immortality in order to find out how to be immortal himself. The story was told by a guy in the desert, claiming he was this king. The tale is full of heroic deeds; The king fights demons, challenges dragons and eventually enters the underworld with the aid of the godess Ishtar. I wanted the look of the film to be quite simple and difficult to place historically. It's a tale set in a world of loincloths, copper swords and sandals. I did sneak in some Sumerian references here and there, such as certain symbols in jewelry, backgrounds and even the monsters, that look like demons and dragons on old Sumerian tablets.





























I knew exactly who to ask to play the king -Dag Persson, poet, actor, musician and strong-willed individual. We had collaborated on many projects when we were both members of an art society that went belly-up a few years back (more about that sorry story later). However, Dag is a very busy man, so the date I had planned for shooting, sometime in April, was hastily postponed. I called Dag again in May and we decided to give it a try in July. Problem was I had another film project already booked in July, but as I knew it would be difficult to get Dag's attention again I decided to go, go, go -even if it meant a lot of unplanned, extra work.




So go, go, go we did and taped the entire live-action part of the film in one exhausting day! I'll get back to that day in a post entirely dedicated to the shooting of the film. Against all odds it all turned out well. The entire film (save a few minutes here and there) were shot against a blue screen, meaning that I can put the actors in any environment I choose. More about the blue screen work too in a while.

Film project 1: Goblin Wood

Actually, I've been so busy doing the stuff I'm supposed to blog about, I haven't had any time to blog about them! The past months in short: I made three films this summer, built props for a stage adaptation of Dracula and made illustrations for three books to be published in the US. Not a bad track record, I think! I'm also continually helping Danny Lenneer in his film projects.

BUT starting off with the first little film project, Goblin Wood. My old friend Björn Karlsson lives in Stockholm with girlfriend Lisa and step-daughter Anjelica, but always comes down to the south of Sweden each summer for a visit. We all went to see Prince Caspian and were so inspired that we decided to do a short-short fantasy film with 9-year old Anjelica.

So in record time my costume-making friend Liz put together an elven shirt and I did a couple of pointy ears. I had already bought a pair of green tights for another film project and I borrowed a quiver and some arrows from my LARPing friend Martin. Björn made a simple but effective bow out of a branch from a juniper shrub. We went off into the deep woods and shot the whole thing in one afternoon. It turned out great! Anjelica was very good and the weather was perfect.

I've promised to have the film ready and out on YouTube before Christmas, and I believe I'll make it. There will be animated goblins and some other weird creatures added and I'm still working on those, but I think the schedule will hold. Stay tuned!

That's what friends are for

I've been helping out my buddy Daniel Lenéer on a couple of his film projects. The latest one, "Wavebreaker", is about the angst-ridden crew on the sub Nautilus. I'm building a period diver's helmet and some other stuff for the project. And I'll be providing animated fish and a giant squid in post production. But we also needed a practicle tentacle for interaction with the cast. I built one out of an old foam matress and covered it with skin and suction cups molded in latex.


Suction cups galore! Ten different sizes were sculpted in Chavant clay and a mold of Ultracal 30 was made from them. It took about one week to cast as many cups as I needed, two casting sessions a day.

Even more suction cups! This is just as I started adding them to the tentacle.

A little test hug, to see if it's flexible and cumfie enough. The skin has not been added yet.




















On to the actual shoot! Camera guy, and sometimes acting guy, Christopher cuddles the tentacle.


















The tentacle finally meets its intended victim, Jimmy, who acts out the squeeze rolling on the floor, perspiring sweat added with a spray bottle. Fun stuff!


















Danny decides the tentacle needs some proper motivation and steps in himself, a true hands-on director (not many women in his films yet. Hmmm...)













The interior of the Nautilus was the basement of the block of flats where Danny lives. Pure and simple. There are neutral walls and some pipes hanging from the cieling, but nothing else that could make that place go as "submarine interior". My initial reaction was "How the hell will we make this work?" Maybe we won't all the time, but there will be scenes where it will work. Other than that it was fun to do. We alternated using the basement set with filming scenes in front of a green screen. The bottom line is Danny & Co know how to make filming fun. I sometimes get lost in the technicalities of making a shot convincing. I once heard a film critic commenting on the "effects" in schlock meistro Ed Wood's ultra B-movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space". It isn't as much a case of Wood not having good effects as just having representative depictions of the effects he would've had, if he had the proper budget. For those of us who do non-commercial, or amateur, films it's the same thing. We do the best we can with what we have. Just because we don't have EVERYTHING we would need to make the finished film match our visions doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. If we reasoned like that nothing would get done.