How a short story started (and almost ended) as a film project

 

In the early months of 2022, while my Norse-myth inspired short film The Wild Huntsman was going through the film festival circuit, I felt so motivated by a recent buying and reading spree of Sword & Sorcery literature that I decided to use this as the basis for my next film project. Although I always intended for it to be more ambitious, complex, and on a much larger scale than the micro-budget two-day shoot of my previous short, I none-the-less quickly settled on a premise that which I knew wouldn't break the bank and chose therefore to tell a magic realism story focused on a Fantasy author rather than attempt my own Conan the Barbarian-style short film. I even set most of my story in a single room—the author's private study, again, for practicality and budget reasons. Granted, it wasn't long before I realised that I did need to let the audience see something in a proper Fantasy setting, so I figured that my author's Conan-inspired Viking warrior, Greywolf, should be allowed a little mini-adventure within a forest early in the story, where some eerie lighting and a few relatively simple props would do the job while still be doable on a small budget.

The script was finished relatively quickly—it is no exaggeration to say that I was riding on a bit of a Fantasy high at the time—and I set about finding people interested in helping me bring the project to reality before spring was over. Confident that some of the people I had worked with before at the London Film Academy would show some interest, I had already set the story in the UK and it was not long before I had a producer who knew their way around the film industry in London. 

This luck would not last, however, and the problems quickly began piling up. Granted there is no such thing as a film production without its hurdles—if anything I've learned that filmmakers tend to get a little anxious if everything runs smoothly. I had been quite disappointed when my first choice for Greywolf turned down the role, but my producer and I merely shrugged off the bad luck and began searching for alternatives. After all, London is a big city. Casting the author, in contrast, was a cinch, and by mid-summer I had my leading man on standby. Where the real source of our mounting troubles truly lay was in a budget that seemed to grow in size day by day. Despite my precautions, the cost quickly proved too big for a private investment (as had been the case with my previous shorts) and we were forced to look for funding from without, something which is never easy with short films. To put it succinctly, there is rarely any money to be made in shorts, so few people are willing to invest in them as there is a slim chance for financial returns. However, by the start of autumn we were still in a positive mindset and continued looking for alternatives.

Eventually autumn turned to winter, and all the steam that had kept the project chugging along seemed to have vanished. Shortly before Christmas my producer, who had already juggled far too many projects at once, was forced to leave what even I had to admit had become a sinking ship.  

Proof-of-concept art commissioned during the pre-production phase of the short film project by Ethan Brown.

In the following months—it was now early 2023—I tried to revive the project locally in Norway, hoping that maybe this project could prove more of a large fish in a small pond-type situation when compared to London, but lacking any real contacts in the local film industry I struggled to find people that were interested. In an attempt to poke a hole in the budget that had previously ballooned out of control, I also re-wrote the script so that my author character, though still an Englishman, had moved to Norway in an ill-fated attempt at reconnecting with his Scandinavian roots in order to inspire his writing. This way I would not have to spend money having to dress things up to look like we were actually in England, and I would only have to cover the travel expenses of my leading man.

By spring I discovered that there were ways to acquire financial help via a local government film fund, though this proved to be more of a hurdle than a solution to my problems and only ended up swallowing up more time. You see, in order to obtain funding you have to follow a set of very strict rules to prove that the project will be a benefit to the Norwegian people (it is government owned after all). Not only does a majority amount of the cast and crew have to be Norwegian citizens (fair enough), the story also needs to have some connection to Norwegian culture (well, I figured Greywolf is a Viking after all), and, the most frustrating aspect of it all, you need to have proper "qualifications" in order to apply in the first place, something which was not made very clear until the rejection letters arrived. Despite running my own independent company, as well as having written, produced and directed several short films, including a few through the London Film Academy, I was simply not professional enough according to their rules as I had never worked for a proper film production company or have a proper university degree.

Feeling quite defeated I felt that I had no other option but to shelve the whole Greywolf project indefinitely.

Not wanting to waste another year I tried to put the whole ordeal behind me and went back to novel writing and by December of 2023 I had finished and published the first book in my new Professor Korrigan paranormal mystery series; The Starseed. At the start of 2024 I felt that I needed a bit of a creative change of pace before I started work on the next installment in the series, so I decided to make a brief return to Sword & Sorcery. Not wanting to let the plot of Greywolf go to waste, I made the decision to adapt the screenplay into a short story. Freed from the constraints of budgets, casting, and government regulations, I was now free to tell the story as I wanted, albeit in a very different medium. Greywolf was published as a Kindle Short Read in July 2024.

Of course, I still very much wish to make Greywolf into a short film as originally intended, and who knows, maybe now that the story is "out there," this is more likely to come to fruition one day. 

If you haven't already read the short story version of Greywolf and would like to do so you can buy it on Amazon Kindle for only $0.99.

How Retired Policemen helped me Research The Starseed

I've previously written about some of the unique challenges that arises when writing about an archeologist, not only for the obvious reason that I am not one myself (though the subject has fascinated me greatly since I was a child), but also how I have had to force myself to focus my research primarily on "outdated" knowledge as any modern information found online would not be relevant when writing about a mid-20th century academic like Professor Korrigan. I wrote about this in another article titled My "Outdated Archaeology Library.

However, since The Starseed is primarily a crime story with elements of archaeology sprinkled in throughout, I was faced with the additional challenge of having to get into the specifics of Norwegian law enforcement in the mid-1970s, something which would never have been possible if not for a handful of people related to the The National Museum of Justice and The Norwegian Police History Society. In this article I would like to add additional thanks to these individuals while also explaining in further detail than what I did in the book's short acknowledgments section on how exactly they helped make my novel as accurate as it is.

The main entrance to the National Museum of Justice in Trondheim, Norway.
Wikimedia Commons photo by Wolfmann.

DIGITAL ARCHIVES AND THE MUSEUM OF JUSTICE

When I first started work on The Starseed I did what most people do when researching any given subject nowadays, I used Google. However, I quickly found that this was quite limiting. I have often found that the internet is rarely the best source of information regarding esoteric subjects here in Norway. Now, if I'd have to solve similar issues related to law enforcement in say, the US or the UK, then it would mostly likely have been a completely different story. The problem with Norway, however, is not so much that the information doesn't exist, but rather that there aren't enough people to allow the information to trickle on to the internet. The population is simply too small. In America, at least when compared to Scandinavia, there is simply no such thing as a niche. Even the smallest and most esoteric of niches, even if the percentage of the population remains as low same as in Norway, you're still likely to find thousands, if not tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people within said niche. America does have a population of over 300 million people after all. Norway in comparison has only 5. 

So, when the internet failed me it became clear that I'd have to go directly to the source of the information that I wanted—which is, let's face it, much more fun anyhow. But where to start?

The extensive digital archives on digitaltmuseum.no proved an invaluable source during the writing process.

Now I must point out that I did have some luck with my online research, mostly thanks to the digital archives at digitaltmuseum.no where I found several photos of items belonging to the police from the middle of the century. However, the labels weren't always too specific on precisely when these items had been used. They preferred to give very broad and general periods of use, usually measured in decades. I did however quickly find that all of them belonged to the same museum, The National Museum of Justice in Trondheim.

Now Trondheim is a fair bit further north in Norway from where I live and at the time going there in person wasn't really an option, but I now had a handful of vaguely labelled photos that I felt gave me a decent sense of what the police men in my current draft would likely use and decided to contact the museum in the hopes that someone there could help me confirm or correct my assumptions. I've found that it's much smarter to ask for corrections than a blank-slate questions that effectively boils down to "do the research for me." I quickly got a reply from Hilde Haaverstad Olsø, the collection administrator and conservator and she not only replied to my list of questions, she also forwarded my request to two individuals with direct experience in law enforcement during the period of my book's setting; retired Kripos investigator Oddmund Dahle & retired police superintendent Magnar Skaret.

Dahle was largely responsible for helping me confirm that my depiction of Kripos, both for The Starseed and a brief appearance in my next book, was largely accurate. Although this book never goes too deep into Kripos operations, it was important to me that the character of Kripos Investigator Harald Hagen, and his function within the story, was completely in line with the duties and jurisdiction of Kripos back in the 1970s. Early in our correspondence it did, however, became apparent that although my depiction of Hagen was very accurate, I had overestimated the full range of Kripos' responsibilities and how they cooperated with other branches of the law. This forced me to make some necessary adjustments to the later chapters in the book where I depict a police raid on the novel's antagonists, the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) eco-terrorists. A bit more on this later.

All in all though, it was really interesting to get to exchange emails with an actual former Kripos investigator, something which I had not expected to happen when I began work on this novel.

TWO TOMES FROM THE POLICE HISTORY SOCIETY

Moving on from Kripos, it must be said that it is Magnar Skaret, a retired police superintendent & chief of staff from Trondheim, who deserves the bulk of the praise when it comes to my depiction of the Norwegian police in the The Starseed. Skaret went beyond simply answering the myriad of questions that I kept sending his way, he was also generous enough to send me copies of two books that he'd written for the The Norwegian Police History Society. Actually, calling them books don't do them justice, they are more like tomes.

After having corresponded with Skaret for a while it became clear to him that the information I was after went well beyond general information about police duties, but ventured into very specific esoterica, something which, thankfully, Skaret was still very much the right man for. Of course, no one can be expected to remember every little detail about police equipment, uniforms, procedures, etc. so he concluded that the best thing to do would be to send me copies of the two books he had written and published at this point. What I received in the mail about a week later were two massive volumes dense with information on every imaginable detail you could imagine related to their broad subject matters. I almost feel a little bad for having since left these two books lying on a shelf where they have remained largely untouched as I only needed a tiny fraction of the knowledge contained within.

Magnar Skaret with his book on police weapons throughout the years.
Photo by S. Aarsbog.

Where these books proved the most useful was for the aforementioned raid depicted towards the end of the novel. After having been corrected by Oddmund Dahle that Kripos would not have been directly responsible for such an operation, I had to figure out exactly who would have been the natural choice. Since Skaret had, among his diverse range of duties over the years worked with Beredskapstroppen, AKA Delta Unit, he recommended I include them in the book. This did pose a bit of a problem as Delta Unit was not made operational until January 11, 1976, about ten months after the setting of my book, I did, for a myriad of reasons that I won't get into here, decide to bend the fact ever-so-slightly in my favour, and include them despite this minor timing anachronism. Yes, there was a somewhat similar unit present before called Østlandstroppen, though I never quite felt that this group had the special kind of training that was required for my fictional raid. Instead I decided to conjure up a secret early trial run of the unit, something which would have been quite plausible as the suggestion to form Delta Unit had been greenlit by the police in January of that same year. 

My depiction of Delta may not be 100% accurate as far as timing is concerned, but their uniforms, equipment, weaponry, and their overall function in the story is completely within the realms of reality had the unit been operation ten months earlier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fra Varde til SMS: Politiets Sambandshistorie. Oslo: Norsk Politihistorisk Selskap, 2009. The title roughly translates to "From Cairns to SMS: The History of Police Communications."

Politiets Våpen: Fra Morgenstjerne til Moderne Automatvåpen. Oslo: Norsk Politihistorisk Selskap, 2017. The title roughly translates to "Police Weapons: From morning stars* to automatic rifles." 

Skaret's tomes on police communications and weaponry.

I would also like to point out that Skaret recently added a third book to his bibliography, this time focusing on police vehicles titled Til lands og til vans og i luften med Politiets Transportmidler. While I was making the final adjustments on The Starseed and sending my final questions to Skaret (I think it was about Delta Unit communications) he informed me that he just handed in the final draft of this book, at over 600 pages. The book was published a few months later in early 2024 via NPHS.

*In case you were wondering what a morning star is (as referred to in the title of the 2nd book), it refers to several types of club-like weapons consisting of a shaft with a spiked ball attached to the top. These were quite common with the night watchmen ('Vekter' in Norwegian) that up until about 150 years ago patrolled the streets with only said club and a lantern. There's actually a well know statue in my hometown of Stavanger depicting one of these watchmen with a morning star in one hand and a lamp in the other (though the latter, minus the handle, was stolen many years ago). You can see a photo of watchman with a morning star on the cover of the 2nd (green) book above.

I would like to once again thank Magnar Skaret, the late Oddmund Dahle (who passed away April 2024), Hilde Haaverstad Olsø, The National Museum of Justice and The Norwegian Police History Society for their help with my research for The Starseed.