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. You can also read the first chapter here.

How a School Exam Became a Short Film

While rummaging through some old carboard boxes left in the back of a closet my mother recently discovered some old school documents I’d written long ago. One was an article dating back to 2008, my last year in Ungdomskolen—the Norwegian equivalent of Junior High School, where I detailed the broad strokes of the history of time travel in fiction. Much to my surprise, however, stapled to the back of this report was a five-page short story simply titled The Time Loop.

Hardly a masterpiece, but not terrible for something written by a Norwegian teenager in about an hour.

It was written in English and was part of my final exam that year (I got an A if you were wondering). It tells the story of an Oxford student named Ian McDougal who is accidentally sent three decades forward in time while working on an experimental device being developed by an eccentric professor. In the future Ian stumbles upon a lecture being held on a now common teleportation device. He decides to steal one of these devices and take it back to the present, figuring it will make him a rich man. The lecturer, who’s also the inventor if this device, catches him in the act and chases after him. Ian succeeds in getting back to the time machine and subsequently back to the present with the stolen device. In the following years he claims the device as his own invention, patents the idea, and becomes one of the richest men in the world. Then, one day thirty years after his time travel incident, while lecturing at his old university he sees someone trying to steal his device, chases after him, only to realise that the young man is his younger self, thereby bringing the circle of events to a final close.

Fourteen years after I wrote this story, in December of 2022, I released a short film on my YouTube channel titled Paradox, and if you’ve already seen it you might have recognised that the plot I described above is nearly identical to the plot of this film. 

This is obviously no coincidence, though you might be surprised to know that until this recent rediscovery by my mother, I was convinced this document had been lost.

Paradox actually started in late 2018 at the London Film Academy, when I was encouraged by the joint principal, Daisy Gili, to write and direct a 10-15 min. short film that would be co-produced by the school. I was at the time getting ready to travel back home to Norway in just a few days and would have to hand in a script before leaving. This didn’t give me much time to come up with a story. Luckily, I remembered the basic plot of The Time Loop, and the following day I handed her the first draft of the script. Ian was now Morgan, Oxford had changed to London, but all the story beats remained pretty much the same. She was pleased with the script and felt it was doable within the agreed budget, so we set a date for the following year when I would return to London to shoot the film.

The shoot itself went quite well, but the post-production can only be described as one of the most frustrating things I have been through. I will keep it short, but suffice it to say that Covid-19 caused many delays and that I did not get a proper “final” cut done until early 2021. Initial screenings to friends and family forced me to admit that I’d made a pretty serious casting error and the following year I decided to reshoot every scene with the middle-aged version of the protagonist, a process requiring multiple green-screen set-ups in London (which was shot by a second unit), something which created many time consuming VFX shots, and the final film was not completed until December 2022. Keep in mind that during the more than three years that had passed between the shoot and the final release, I had written a whole novel, started work on two more, not to mention written, produced, shot, edited and released a whole other short film earlier that year. It’s safe to say that this is by far the longest I have ever worked on a single story—for better and for worse.

Despite all this, I must say it was a fun experience once more hold the original short story in my hands and being able to read the original idea for the first time in sixteen years (even if the writing wasn't very good).

The film crew, plus lead actor Perry Jaques, on wrap day in August 2019.