Within The Shadow Of The Tree Movie Update

Well, Within The Shadow Of The Tree Is finally finished and I was hoping to give you a link to a trailer, but I was informed yesterday  by the funding people that if I do put a trailer on line this would make the film exempt from being entered into film festivals that they want it to be entered into. I was not aware of this when I promised to have a trailer online, so I have sent  more pics of which they said is fine and will cause no problems.

Any hoo, this time the pics are showing some  aspects of the making, from Makeup tests to prosthetic application, a design and maquette of the evil father, forest villain shoot were I¹m standing beside Forest villain number two..  he is a big  character but he is more like a friendly giant, only he would eat you given half  the chance. His head piece is also there so you can take a better look and there is a variety of other pics showing other aspects from the shoot. There is obviously a lot more pics but we are  all to shattered to sort them  out at the moment...

I would¹nt like to say how long we have been working on the film... too long!  We have ran out of money to many times to mention, but I must admit the people I have worked with on on the film  have all being fabulous. The only one problem being on the whole shoot, the vegetarian sandwiches were not up to scratch ... not bad going. A little bit of a back story if you want to know.

Within The Shadow Of the Tree Part One Dark Dreams was never meant to be made as a indie film, we were hoping by making  two or three minutes of the film and producing  hundreds of story boards and designs we could use this to sell the idea and this was long before the Lord Of The Ring movies, the inspiration for the film came from Henson Films such as the Dark Crystal, Labyrinth also a bit of Star Wars mixed in with a bit of the original series of He Man. I like lots of characters who sort of look like what their talents are,  that's why Rawldrol has a big eye, he is a spy, a character who can project the images  back out of it to show his Master Lord Akrafa. All of the characters have something they can do in relation to their appearance.

Any how back to why we made the film, a world renowned animator called Sheila Graber saw some the segments we had shot  and persuaded me to apply for funding to enlarge on the film and produce more footage. I did and was given the funding in an instant , so the production got instantly bigger, even though that was not our original plan, filming obviously out of continuity we did scenes that were further on in the story and the sets were the same so it made sense to shoot the scenes while we were there. We did¹nt want to have  to rebuild if we did have to come back, this stretched out the film but meant we ran out of money, but never the less using some of the footage and the media coverage on the News we were able to get  more funding to join the gaps so to speak. I¹m not talking great amounts of money just enough to keep on filming. Everyone involved got paid but they understood it would be only what the production could afford, they were happy to do this because they  could use the making pics and film footage to get work in the industry, and that they did. One of the main model builders and SFX people went on to work on  the model departments of Harry Potter, he now runs the head model unit. Several others  also went on to do other things in the industry all over the world, even down to the post production sound,  Andy Ludbrook the person responsible for the sound for Dog Soldiers  added some cool sounds and a unique atmosphere to the whole film.

All I can say is that when we started on the film we all did not know what we were getting ourselves into but we battled on and  because everyone enjoyed working on it and we became very organised and budget conscious because I would not like to tell you how little money we've had, but we won through and hopefully we may get a reasonable distribution deal that allows  us to continue telling the rest of the story, because the story is gigantic. The first part of the film is deliberately contained so it was possible for us to make it but after part one the story just becomes even bigger in scale and there are a lot more characters that again all have different abilities and talents. I would love to do the next part but our next project is a horror film and we are starting to get excited about that, so hopefully if that is successful also it  may give us the opportunity to return to the story of Within The Shadow Of The Tree and we can tell the next two parts... well three as we did work out where the story could go a few years down the line, as you do.

You can view more pics in our Within the Shadow of the Tree Gallery.