Connecting with the past through Roman clay lamps in an Iron Age longhouse

 

While attending a seminar on Museum Education at the Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug as part of my postgraduate studies at the University in Stavanger (UiS), I spotted something I had not expected to see; a replica of a Roman clay lamp. Although not temporally anachronistic (the original farmhouse had been in use between ca. AD 350–550), it was rather out of place geographically.

After having toured the largest of the three reconstructed longhouses—a locale I’ve become very familiar with over the years, both as a lover of history since childhood and as a filmmaker in 2021—I decided to ask our guide and instructor about the lamp. She agreed that it was a bit out of place, but as evidence of lamps from the period are quite scarce, and since the replica was based on lamps from roughly the right period, it had likely been included by the museum simply as a convenient prop to illustrate how people illuminated their homes in antiquity.

Note that the Iron Age Norwegians were hardly isolated from the rest of Europe, though, unlike the later Viking Age, trade with the Mediterranean was somewhat minimal. Still, the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger does feature large bronze pots with Romanesque designs from the same period, Roman glassware was also imported—presumably via Germany and Denmark—as prized luxury goods (a few examples from digitaltmuseum), and the occasional Roman coin do pop up every now and then. However, no one has ever found a Roman style clay lamp, at least not yet.

However, fascinating as all this was, I was (and still am as of the writing of this article) in the process of writing the second book in my Professor Korrigan mystery series, this time focused on the Roman occupation of Britain, and it just so happened that I was planning on writing a chapter where such a lamp featured. In this chapter, without giving too much away, Korrigan encounters what can best be described as a spectral artefact—or an ‘apport’ as it’s called in paranormal circles; a seemingly tangible but actually incorporeal object projected into the present from the past (quite fanciful, I know, but my last novel featured an extra-terrestrial substance, so why not?). As such it was in my best interest to get to know such objects as closely as possible in order to be able to convey to the reader all of the sensory impressions Korrigan would experience handling and studying this mysterious object. As a history student at the university, and someone already familiar to the museum staff—seeing as I literally borrowed the whole longhouse for a short film shoot just a few years earlier—I asked them if I might be allowed to have get a proper look at the lamp, and perhaps even get to actually light it. Despite the fact that the tour/seminar had been at the very tail end of the summer season and they were now officially closed for autumn/winter, they generously agreed to make a special appointment for me.

Killing two birds with one stone I had scheduled to meet with Inger Horve, the Operations Manager at the Iron Age Farm, just after a lecture at the university. The reconstructed farmstead is a part of the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger, which in turn is a branch of the University, and conveniently for me, just right up the road from my faculty on campus. I’d agreed to meet with Horve by the largest of the longhouses, but the lecture had finished early, so I was about twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

The Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug as you approach it from the old gate. Before the visitor’s centre was built in 2018 (now closed during the off-season) this was how you always visited the open-air museum. At least when you approach from the visitor’s centre (just out of frame to the left) you can’t immediately see the three (somewhat immersion-breaking) city blocks in the background. Photo taken November 2026. 

I approached through the old gate—not being able to enter by the now closed visitor’s centre—and passed about a dozen sheep, all quite accustomed to people and thoroughly indifferent to my presence. During the aforementioned tour that had inspired this whole visit a few weeks earlier, our guide and instructor, who had previously worked here as a museum host, introduced us to the two matriarchs of the sheep flock, whose names were Aud Jr. and Embla. As I zigzagged past the clusters of sheep droppings and made my way to the main entrance to the largest longhouse, I also recalled what she had told the group while we’d all gathered in the same spot a few weeks earlier. She’d pointed down at a white blotch on the ground and told us that this was the incriminating evidence left by Aud Jr. after a recent flour raid inside the longhouse; the result of a careless host having forgotten to close the door properly. Inside is a recreation of a hand-turned millstone that is used to demonstrate, especially to schoolchildren, just how labour-intensive it was to produce a simple loaf of bread in Antiquity. However, once the sheep discovered the joys of licking away all the excess flour produced by these demonstrations, they quickly became hard to keep out—especially Aud Jr., whom Inger Horve later described to me as the “ringleader,” and a bad influence on the other sheep. After she’d led us all into the longhouse, the last of us to do so, as per her instructions, had closed the door behind him to not let any sheep sneak in. A few minutes later we heard the muffled, annoyed bleating of a foiled Aud Jr. just outside the door. 

Back in the present I was about to knock on the somewhat modern-looking wooden door when I noticed it was open; a slight crack between it and the doorframe. I let myself in and found the place empty of both sheep and humans, though the lights were on. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was intruding, but I did after all have an appointment. I’d never been inside without a tour guide or other tourists present, so I took the opportunity to have a look around and found the Roman lamp down by the now cold hearth, just as it had been previously. Now that I got a proper look at it in the light it was a lot greasier than I’d remembered, almost pitch black. It was sticky to the touch. When Horve arrived, right on time, I was pleased to see that she’d brought not only the wicks and oil as agreed, but a brand-new lamp for my little experiment.

The interior of the largest longhouse at the Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug. Photo taken November 2026.

For fuel she had brought a bottle of “Tran,” a brand of cod liver oil that most Norwegians have childhood memories of reluctantly downing as it’s a very popular dietary supplement rich in omega-3 fatty acids and various vitamins. Now this might seem like a bit of an odd choice for lamp fuel—and I was a little surprised myself when I first heard that this is what they commonly use in these lamps at the open-air museum. For context, in antiquity most people would have used olive oil; a commodity that was anything but scarce in the Roman sphere of influence across the Mediterranean during the height of the empire. Olives are, however, not exactly a common thing up here in the cold north of Scandinavia and certainly would have been completely unknown to the Norwegians of the Iron Age. Of course, my interest in these lamps was in relation to Roman Britain, though there too we encounter the same problem. In my research I found that, although olive oil was imported to the Roman occupying forces, it became something of a luxury commodity reserved for the elite. Since my story is focused on the Roman army, specifically the lower-ranking auxiliary troops, olive oil was therefore out of the question. Let’s not forget that olive oil is also foodstuff, so unless you lived at the heart of a wealthy city like Rome or Carthage where you could expect a fair amount of food surplus, you were effectively just burning up something edible. Doing some more research I found that there were several substitutes produced in Roman Britain, such as sesame oil, nut oil, castor oil and animal products such as fish oil. Since fish oil kept popping up in later Medieval British historical references as well, and since it was what the museum had on hand, I decided to simply go with the more practical alternative. I’d also read that fish oil lamps were quite malodorous and produced a smoky flame, all of which seemed to fit in well with my hapless auxiliary soldiers deployed on a cold and rainy island to the north to stand watch on Hadrian’s newly constructed defensive wall with the “barbarian” Celts waiting for their chance to strike back against the invaders on the other side. 

As you can see in the photos below these lamps come with a very convenient, recessed hole for pouring the oil into (the “dish” around it is called a discus, though this one was rather flat) and I quickly discovered how easy it was to overfill the lamp and ended up creating a little pool of oil. The wick that Horve had brought with her, which looked like a little shoelace, was made from very finely weaved wool threads. In antiquity such wicks would commonly have been made from scraps of linen, papyrus, or oakum. The matches I was given had been stored in the longhouse, and since this was in early November, they had gotten a little damp. As I sat there striking the same match again and again, barely getting a spark, I could imagine myself back in antiquity with a flint and tinder struggling to start a flame. Eventually I did get a flame going and lit the wick. Once the flame reached the oil in the nozzle (rostrum, literally “beak”) it lit up remarkably well. It was a surprisingly wild flame, completely different from the calm, gentle flicker of a modern candle. As expected, the flame produced a lot of smoke. Horve turned off the electric lights and, although a little daylight did seep in from some small openings in the roof, it was impressive how well it lit up my immediate surroundings. I brought out my notebook and found that I could easily read from it. The biggest surprise, however, was the smell. It was actually quite nice. It had a very fresh hint of lime to it. We checked the Tran bottle and found that it had been lime flavoured to be more palatable, and being such a modern product, probably didn’t give any indication of the foul smells I’d read about. I’ll just have to use my imagination for this particular detail when I describe it in my novel.

The light looks quite calm on this photo, but the wild, flickering flame, with its oddly extended smoky wisp was quite unlike any modern candle I’ve used. It felt appropriately archaic, though when contrasted with the rustic setting of the Iron Age farmhouse, it also felt quite modern and “civilised.” 

Horve had also brought with her the stems of some soft rush (juncus effusus), which, when peeled, produce a slightly spongy pith filling that can be used as a wick. In Norwegian this plant is called lyssiv, which literally translates as “light-rush,” suggesting a very old association with lamps. Incidentally, the Norwegian word for the cod liver oil, tran, comes from the Middle Low Saxon trān, which means “drop” or “teardrop” (NOAB). However, the Icelandic name for cod oil is Lýsi, and if we compare this to the aforementioned lyssiv, we have a word that sounds almost identical to the Norwegian word for “light.” In Icelandic Lýsi literally refers to something that provides light (Zoëga, 281), demonstrating that fish oil too has been a common lamp oil in this part of the world for a very long time.

In our case, though, the “light-rush” did not provide all that much light and the flame at the end of the spongy wick was quite small and dim. Horve figured the rush was a bit too damp for our experiment, though it did demonstrate that it was viable as a wick, even if our attempt went out after only five minutes or so. It probably didn’t help either that the original woollen wick used for this lamp had gotten stuck inside the lamp when the end of the wick protruding from the nozzle had burned away some time earlier. In antiquity a small needle, or specialised tweezers, were used to pull the wick out as it burned down to avoid this from happening.

The soft rush wick did work but provided a much smaller flame due to it having not been dried out properly. Some unpeeled rush can be seen lying in the background. The dark coating on the lamp is the result of several years of accumulative soot mixed with the overflow of fish oil. 

Trying to figure out exactly what type of Roman lamp the replicas were based on according to established typological classification proved a lot trickier than I’d expected, though they both seem to correspond pretty well with the Loeschcke type X lamps (or Buchi type X-a), often referred to as the “Roman Factory Lamp” and dating to around AD 90 to the end of the third century. These are generally identified by their lack of decoration, though Bacchic or comic mask motifs do frequently appear in the centre of the characteristically flat-bottomed discus. Another distinguishing feature is the raised rim that forms a channel all the way out to and around the wick-hole on the nozzle, not an altogether uncommon feature, but the sharp angles are very typical of the Loeschcke type X. So far so good. On each side, outside the circular rim, are two or three knobs, which on actual antique lamps are the remains of broken off rings used for suspending the lamp with chains. How exactly only two attachment points were supposed to suspend the lamp without it tipping over and spilling the oil out the nozzle beats me but looking at a lot of photos from museums I see that many of these lamps did indeed only have two attachment points. Either way, our modern lamp-maker has either added these knobs simply as an allusion to this historical suspension feature or may simply have been unaware of their exact purpose. What we’re left with are two vestigial dimples divorced from their original practical purpose. I’m glad I discovered this, as, when I was standing inside the longhouse, holding the lamp in my hand, I kept wondering what on earth these little knobs were meant for. They seemed a rather pointless detail to add purely for decoration, and I could find no practical reason for them as I held it in my hand, seeing as they did not provide a natural place for my fingers to rest either.

Two examples of Loeschcke type X, or “factory lamps,” from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (public domain photos).

Left: Terracotta mould-made lamp decorated with a theatre mask design, Roman (Cologne, Germany), 1st–2nd century AD. Object Number: 83.AQ.377.441.

Right: Terracotta mould-made lamp, Roman (possibly North African), 1st century AD. Object Number: 83.AQ.377.444.

All in all, I feel it was a very successful experiment. Although I still have no idea how burning fish oil would have smelled in antiquity, and there are still certain details that needs to be ironed out for my novel, what started as a vaguely defined object I’d only seen in photos; with no real sense of scale, weight, texture, and actual efficiency, I now understand as a tangible, practical object.

This whole experience, even if it mostly just consisted of me fiddling with a couple lamps for about half an hour, and discussing history with a museum-educator, actually highlights really well the value of institutions such as The Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug, and open-air museums in general. For the past few years now I’ve been spending much of my time sitting in lecture halls, listening to historians talk about the past, and while this is certainly very valuable (and something I quite enjoy), it doesn’t do much to put you into the shoes of the people who lived in the past. You get a lot of interesting information but few tangible experiences to connect them to. But when standing in a dimly lit, slightly damp, chilly reconstruction of an Iron Age House, feet planted on well-trodden earth (the original excavated flooring by the way), and the only source of light you have is a flickering flame emanating from a small clay container you’re holding in your hand, you do get a certain empathic connection with the past; a feeling of presence. Of course, such props are just that, props, and not a true indication of the past, but it does concretise and bring to life an otherwise abstract past in a way that is educational on a much more tactile level than reading a book or listening to a lecture ever can.

And this is far from my first experience of this kind in this very building. As I alluded to earlier, I have been coming to this open-air museum fairly regularly since I was a child, and when I was nine years old, I actually spent the night here with a group of kids as part of a special arrangement. I got to taste bread made with flour grounded in the millstone and baked over a flame. It was surprisingly tasty, though the stone-ground flour did mean it was infused with grit; small particles of stone that ground against my teeth. Every bite into the otherwise soft bread had a slightly unsettling crunch to it. At that moment I understood why skeletons from this era always have noticeably worn-down teeth and why historians often talked about how they could identify someone’s approximate age by simply looking at how worn down the teeth were. If I had been eating bread like this every day my whole life my teeth would already have been in a pretty bad state as well. Likewise, sleeping on what effectively amounts to a wooden shelf with animal hides to keep you warm (though for practical reasons we did bring modern sleeping bags as well) and having a low flame crackling nearby, the flickering flames casting dancing shadows around the wooden support beams, is one of the most vivid experiences I’ve had in relation to my appreciation and understanding of history. And this kind of intuitive historical consciousness is exactly what places like the Iron Age Farm were made for.

Literature: 

Bailey, Donald M. Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps. London: British Museum, 1972.

Bussière, Jean, and Birgitta Lindros Wohl. Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017. http://www.getty.edu/publications/ancientlamps (Accessed 04 November 2026). 

Walters, H. B. Catalogue of the Greek and Roman Lamps in the British Museum. London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1914.  

Zoëga, Geir Tómasson. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.

PS. For some much nicer exterior photos of the Iron Age Farm than the one I quickly snapped on my way up from campus, plus some more details about its history, check out my previous article The Locations that Inspired The Starseed.

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.

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 or as a paperback for $5.99. You can also read the first chapter here.

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 associated with 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 authentic 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, especially 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 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 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 a lot 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 20th 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 have used 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 rather than 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 & 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 another novel I'm working on, 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 quickly became apparent that although my depiction of Hagen himself was quite 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 depicted 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 predicted 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 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 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 vast 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 that 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 story. Int he end, however, I decided to bend the facts ever-so-slightly in my favour, and included 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 correct 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 operational ten months earlier.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Skaret, Magne. Fra Varde til SMS: Politiets Sambandshistorie [translation: From Cairns to SMS: The History of Police Communications.] Oslo: Norsk Politihistorisk Selskap, 2009.

Skaret, Magne. Politiets Våpen: Fra Morgenstjerne til Moderne Automatvåpen [translation: Police Weapons: From morning stars* to automatic rifles]. Oslo: Norsk Politihistorisk Selskap, 2017.

*In case you were wondering what a morning star is, 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 below.

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.

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.

Making The Wild Huntsman

In spring of 2021, as lockdowns were starting to ease in Norway, and after having spent the previous year writing my first novel, I felt the need to flex my filmmaking muscles again and decided to make a short Fantasy film. Equipped with a meagre budget of roughly 10,000 NOK (the equivalent of about $900 or £700) and not much else—I was pretty much on my own and had little to no experience with the small film culture that exists on the Norwegian south-west coast around my hometown of Stavanger.

Inspired by the English folktale of the Odinic character Herne the Hunter, I quickly wrote a simple script and set out looking for my cast and crew.

My biggest stroke of luck was when I come in contact with actor and model Thor Rosland, who is generally known for his commercials for The Beard Struggle, in which dressed as a Viking, he promotes a series of beard oils and grooming products in comedic skits which had become something on an online sensation.

And with the upcoming release of The Pendragon Cycle, in which Thor plays Hengist, the warlord of the Saxons, this seemed like a good opportunity to reminisce a little about my short film with Thor; The Wild Huntsman.

Thor Rosland as The Huntsman. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

THE PREMISE

First off, I should probably explain in more details where I got the idea for the Huntsman and why I chose to make a short film out of it. 

I’ve always been fascinated by fairy tales, folk stories and myths from across the world. I'm especially fascinated by symbolic archetypes, doubly so when they appear across borders in the myths of neighbouring cultures. So, while looking for inspiration for my script, I came across the Danish/German folk tale of "The Fairy Hunter," a simple story about a hunter that kills an elf-girl (note that elf in this case refers to a more mischievous fay-like creature rather than the noble elves popularised by books/films like Lord of the Rings). Shortly after I came across the British legend of Herne the hunter, an antlered huntsman who is believed to be an incarnation of both the Celtic god Cernunnos and the head of the Norse gods; Odin—the latter of which is also the leader of the Wild Hunt. With these two simple stories in mind, I decided to combine them and create my own little cross-cultural archetype myth.

Thor Rosland as The Huntsman. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

The simplicity of both stories also made them perfect for my meagre budget and resources. I knew that my hometown of Stavanger could provide me with plenty of beautiful nature scenery befitting both folk tales, but also a perfect replica of an Iron Age farmhouse. I contacted the owners early on in the production and received permission to shoot parts of my short there, as well as borrow some of their period-accurate costumes.

I was off to a good start.

RALLYING A CAST & CREW

The lead (different from the titular character) proved to be the most difficult to cast as I required someone fairly young but who still had a Viking-quality to his appearance. The casting of Thor as the Huntsman had been something of a lucky stroke, and all the characters (despite there only being four) proved difficult. Stavanger simply isn’t a place with that large a film industry or acting community, and the fact I was producing a micro budget short film and was only offering to cover expenses didn’t exactly help much either. 

All attempts at casting the lead led me to an assortment of Oslo actors that had to be rejected due to the travel costs, though I eventually got into contact with Vegard Heggelund, a young actor with a proper Nordic look to him who, despite living and studying in Oslo, was actually from Karmøy—a large island not far north of Stavanger. It just so happened that he was planning a visit home for the summer holiday and he was more than willing to sacrifice a weekend for this project provided I could cover the cost of the relatively short trip down to Stavanger and accommodation, a request I was more than happy to oblige.

Actor Vegard Heggelund. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

The shooting crew consisted of three media students from the University in Stavanger, a somewhat meager number for a film shoot but perfectly serviceable for a small project like this—it's worth mentioning that I have worked with less in the past, though I wouldn't recommend it. Still, it was an odd adjustment after having recently spent some time in London with film crews of at least a dozen or so people (which is still quite small). 

At the risk of sounding like a money pincher, I've found that you can save a lot of money by "hiring" students as they are usually more than happy to get the chance to add any project to their CV before they've even finished their education. I also got the camera equipment for free via the university as I had borrowed from them before, so they knew I was someone who could be trusted with their equipment.

A small but very efficient film crew. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

The on-set photographer; Kornelius Kiil Enoksen, (whose excellent photos I’ve used throughout this article) is a friend of mine from my days studying Media & Communications. The rest of the crew consisted of pretty much every family member, friend, or friend-of-a-friend that I could convince to spend a weekend in July hanging out in a park while the rest of us were running about within the nearby woods getting our shots.

ANTLERS, SPEARS & COW TAILS

In the same way that digital cameras have become a godsend for the low budget filmmaker (though I do love analogue film), so has Etsy for the micro budget prop-maker. 

You’d think the Huntsman’s antlers would have proven to be the most difficult part of the pre-production—and in a sense it still was—but after some brief online searching I came across someone who made realistic looking horns and antlers for fantasy cosplayers. As luck would have it, she was also Norwegian, albeit living in Oslo, but after contacting her and explaining what I needed she was more than willing to make me some custom antlers with strengthened supports for the production. 

Etsy also provided me with a pretty convincing ancient-looking spearhead made from fiberglass and polyester resin, as well as the Mystery Girls’ animal appendage. One learns many strange things while working on projects like this, and the fact that you can buy real cow tails online is one of those things that really shouldn't surprise you, but receiving one in the mail is a whole other thing.  

Vegard Heggelund mending a prop between takes. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

The more “normal” props, such as a mediaeval fishing rod, I constructed myself. There’s not much to say about the making of the rod, it’s about what you’d expect, a bit of whittling, some twine, glue, etc. and the bone hooks were fashioned out of clay. But the one thing that I am quite proud of about this prop is just how historically accurate it turned out to be. No fishing rods have ever been found by archaeologist in Scandinavia, though based on the numerous discoveries of hooks made from deer bone it is safe to assume that they were used during the Viking Age. The simple rod I made was based off recreations of English fishing rods from the Middle Ages, but only a year or so after the film’s premiere I went to the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger and saw an exhibition of experimental recreations of bone hooks, and I was pleased to see that they looked virtually identical to my fake ones.

A few weeks before the shoot I met Thor in his home for a costume fitting and to try out the newly arrived antlers from Oslo. 

When it came to the costume for the Huntsman, I chose, both for practical and thematic reasons, to do the complete opposite that I planned on doing for the main character (the "Young Viking") and his family, and ignored historical accuracy completely. The practical reason for this was, of course, primarily because Thor could provide his own costume, which was more Hollywood inspired than anything based on history or archaeology. But because I knew the Huntsman would have to stand out and appear otherworldly when compared to the more "normal" characters, the exaggerated costumes he used for his Beard Struggle commercials fit perfectly, though admittedly I did end up choosing the most down to earth pieces he had in his wardrobe. Being a mythical creature that is part of the natural order I felt the brown leather gave him a suitably “earthy” look, while the fur around his shoulders complimented the animal-hybrid look of the antlers, making him appear somewhat elemental. 

Thor Rosland putting on his costume. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

THE IRON AGE FARM

To paraphrase what I wrote in a previous blog article (The Locations that Inspired The Starseed); Just a few kilometres uphill from the inlet where Harald Fairhair united the tribes of Norway into a single nation after the battle of Hafrsfjord in 872 AD, a trio of carefully reconstructed Iron Age longhouses lie in the shadows of three brutalist apartment blocks from the mid-1970s.

I’ve been coming to this location semi-regularly since childhood (I even spent a night there as a Boy Scout) and have always been fascinated by the feeling of being transported back in time when visiting, that is, as long as you look away from the aforementioned apartment blocks, or the nearby visitors centre, and if you look south you can pretty much see the entirety of the University in Stavanger, but, if you point your camera in the right direction, or simply stay within the longhouses, then it really does feel like you’ve travelled back to the Iron Age. And that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

Setting up a shot at the Iron Age Farm in Ullandhaug. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

As mentioned, I had contacted the manager of the Iron Age Farm early on in the project and I quickly received permission from her to shoot in and about the open-door museum, that is, provided we arrived before opening time, so as to not crash with any potential visitors. We were also given permission to pick out some of the authentic period-costumes they had for Vegard to wear throughout the shoot (even when not filming on the site) and we were told that the shoot would be overseen by one of their regular hosts—in costume no less. They were, however, somewhat vague on who exactly would be there when we arrived for the shoot, but assured me that whoever they were, they wouldn’t mind being on camera. So, I adjusted the script slightly by adding a brother/sister/mother background character, depending on who actually did show up.

We arrived early in the morning on June 26, having pretty much just a little over an hour to prepare and shoot everything we needed before the tourist would start arriving. We were greeted by a young woman in a period accurate dress named Johanne, and as such the main character ended up with a sister. Vegard was taken to the costume room and quickly fitted with his costume, while actor Pål Gunnar Eid Gribbestad, who played his father, provided his own costume. 

Pål Gunnar Eid Gribbestad inside the Iron Age longhouse. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

The host proved very enthusiastic about the project and lit a fire within the largest longhouse. She even dropped by the kitchen in the visitor centre café to get some fish to cook on the stone plate to add some domestic realism to the film's opening scene. She had no qualms about being on camera and even ended up becoming the first character we see in the finished film. Lit primarily by the fire (and a flickering red LED light), the opening shots of Johanne and Paul Gunnar are, I think, some of the best in the film. 

All went according to schedule, and we managed to wrap up just as the doors officially opened on the Iron Age Farm. While the film crew began carrying all the camera equipment away from the longhouses towards the visitor centre a small group of period-dressed hosts crossed us going in the opposite direction carrying wooden swords and other replicas of Iron Age implements meant to entertain and educate visitors.

Vegard Heggelund. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

THE LAKE AND THE FOREST

The rest of the film was shot around a small lake called Lille Stokkavann (lit: Little Stokka Lake) a short walk from where my mother, aunts and uncle grew up—I even spent part of my own childhood here, so it was very familiar territory.

When we arrived at our "green room," a nearby barn turned into a community centre, the rest of the crew had already unpacked and were waiting for us. We shot everything needed around the lake that day, as well as a long sequence within the nearby woods which in the final edit was cut down to a mere two shots. That’s filmmaking for you.

Discussing the scene with Vegard Heggelund. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

We returned to the same location for the second day, this time being joined by Thor Rosland, and spent the entire day within a small clearing close to a well-travelled gravel footpath hugging the edge of the lake. The crew of friends and family kept watch while the rest of us were working within the forest, informing joggers and people simply out for a stroll that there was a shoot going on. Most people were quite polite and passed by quietly, though we did receive a fair number of curious onlookers peeking at us through the bramble. Hardly surprising really, it’s not every day you see a large Viking with antlers while walking your dog. 

I had originally planned to use a smoke machine for this sequence to add a haunting, mystical atmosphere to the already picturesque forest clearing, but although I had acquired one via the university and had successfully tested it in the studio there a few days earlier, once we set it up in the forest, with a portable battery, spare fluid and everything, the little box-like machine merely sputtered out a few wimpy whisp of smoke and refused to give us anything else. 

Vegard Heggelund & Thor Rosland between takes. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

While irksome, the smoke machine was hardly necessary to finish the scene, even if I did loose much of the mythic aura I wanted to convey. At least the lights worked as intended, and I could console myself by getting a chance to play with some coloured gels for the first time, something which I learned a lot from and intend to continue to do in future film projects. I may have been denied my smoke, but I did succeed in using the unnatural green lighting as a means of conveying that there was something otherworldly about this forest and its two supernatural inhabitants.

Once the broken smoke machine had been ditched the shoot went quite smoothly, that is as smoothly as a shoot can be when an actor is forced to wear wobbly antlers on his head inside a dense forest, but apart from the logistics of shooting everything out of order (more so than usual) there were little to complain about, that is, except for the poor actress playing the Mystery Girl, who, unlike the two men, wore a pretty skimpy dress that made her an easy target to a swarm of very persistent gnats. I later learned she’d been bitten quite often, but she had merely soldiered on and finished the shoot with very few complaints.

Directing a scene with Thor Rosland. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

THE MYSTERY GIRL

Now, unless you're a Scandinavian, or just so happen to be well-read on Nordic folklore, you are probably not familiar with the creature that the Mystery Girl is revealed to be at the end of the short film. Although certain liberties have been taken with this myth, most Scandinavians watching the short will instantly recognise her as a Hulder (or Huldra) the moment her cow tail is revealed.

The Hulder is for all intents and purposes the Nordic equivalent of a siren or nymph, i.e. a seductress that leads men to their doom by enticing them to follow her into the forest.

Shooting a scene with Helen Sertsu. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

As with most folklore it’s hard to pin down the exact nature of a Hulder, though they are consistently depicted as young, beautiful blonde girls with a cow’s tail (which they usually try to hide). In many stories they also have a large hole on their back described as resembling a rotten tree stump. My Hulder obviously deviates a fair bit from much of this, the back-hole simply because it wouldn’t have been doable within the tiny budget (and frankly I don’t see what the point of it is beyond being weird) and although I originally intended to cast a Norwegian actress with blonde hair, actress Helen Sertsu was chosen due to her enthusiasm for the project and her availability. With this change in ethnicity, I decided to update the originally planned costume from an Iron Age dress to something more Mediterranean, specifically a Greek-inspired Khiton dress, implying that this creature in human form did not solely prey on Scandinavians, but had been chased by the Huntsman across multiple countries for who knows how many centuries. I also added additional details to her costume to further imply this long history, such as an amber necklace which suggested she had been in central Europe, a Celtic broch attached to her belt, and I even had some silver thread worked into the hem of the dress to add a subtle anachronism that made her seem just a little out of place in the “real world” of the Young Viking. 

Helen Sertsu. Photo © Kornelius Kiil Enoksen.

POST-PRODUCTION & RELEASE

The post-production phase proved to be somewhat more international than the shoot. The music was composed by Swedish artist Zacharias Wolfe, whom I had first heard of via The London Film Academy, and “Yggdrasill,” the song which plays over the end credits was licensed from Dutch singer and songwriter Jonathan Barendsma, AKA Gealdýr. The visual effects were done by Guilherme Filipe, while the rest of the process, such as film editing, colour grading, etc. was either done by myself or Kevin Nordlander (who was also the Assistant Director).

The Wild Huntsman had its premiere in the US, February 18, 2022, at the Pensacon Short Film Festival in Pensacola, Florida.

Making the Book Trailer for The Starseed

NOTE: This article references the full-length book trailer for The Starseed in a way that assumes you are already familiar with it. If you have not seen it, or if you'd like to re-familiarise yourself with the video, you can do so by clicking HERE.

INTRODUCTION

My biggest passion as a creative person has always been filmmaking. Although I did write fiction as a child, I was not much of an avid reader until later, and once I started making amateur films with my friends at age 12 it quickly became apparent to me that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

Of course, filmmaking, even in its simplest form is still an expensive and labour-intensive process requiring a fair amount of people, and the fact that I’m drawn towards sci-fi, fantasy and historical fiction hasn’t exactly made things easier.

In this case literature has been a real blessing for me. Granted, making a novel isn’t exactly free, especially if you want it to be up to professional standards. Though in the case of The Starseed I managed to save some money by designing the cover myself—one of the many benefits of a Media & Communications education. But, compared to a making a film, writing a novel is about as financially freeing as it can be, and you are only limited by your imagination. There are no actors’ fees, no location permits, no props, no sets. If you can write it, the audience can (hopefully) imagine it.

Of course, a book still requires some marketing if you want people to become aware of it. So, I decided to put some of my filmmaking skills to good use and make a book trailer. Most trailers that are out there, even the “professional” ones, are in my opinion, quite lacklustre, often relying on bland stock footage. I wanted to make something that would stand out.

THE CONCEPT

I was still working the novel when I started work on the trailer (final rewrites, spell checks, fact checks, that sort of thing), and not wanting to distract myself too much from finishing the very thing I was going to market, I decided to avoid anything that could accidentally turn it into an expensive short film. I therefore decided to make the video entirely out of still images, something which also had the added benefit of making it unlikely that it would be mistaken for a trailer for an actual film. Stills of real people and locations would provide me with a certain degree of authenticity, but it would be different enough to not give a false impression of the “product” I was advertising.

Naturally, as often is the case with any creative process, I started with many different ideas, some good, some bad, not to mention some very ambitious, until out of discipline and, unfortunately, in some cases, out of plain bad luck, I eventually managed to whittle it all down to something simple and surmountable.

GOING ANALOGUE

I have always been a sucker for the analogue aesthetic. Digital technology has served me well in the past (and still do), and I would not have been able to do most of my short film work without it, but there is simply something special about celluloid film. I have been fortunate enough to have shot one of my short films at the London Film Academy on super 16mm film, and I very much hope to one day be able to upgrade to full 35mm film as I genuinely see it as the superior medium for filmmaking. There is simply a richness to the colours, a depth in the collection of silver crystals, a sharpness of the interplay between light and shadow that simply cannot be fully emulated digitally. Of course, digital video has reached a level of quality that makes it a more than worthy alternative, though I am adamant that it is not a substitute.

However, for this book trailer 35mm film provided me with several benefits, and in this case it did admittedly have very little to do with image quality. Here it was simply a case of instant authenticity. I have several SLR cameras, all of which belonged to my mother, ranging from the simple to the complex. For practical reasons I went with complex and chose to use two Canon SLR cameras from the late 80s. Not entirely authentic to 1975, but I did not want to risk anything going wrong with the “cheaper” cameras from the 70s. I knew I would have to be economic with my 35mm film, though my initial, and frankly naïve, assumption that I could pull off the entire trailer with just one roll of film quickly escalated to four.

My Canon EOS 650 & Canon EOS 5 cameras.

FINDING PROFESSOR KORRIGAN

I had originally planned to find local actors, models, or just anyone who was willing to be photographed, to portray all of my main characters, not just Professor Korrigan, but Marshall, Hagen, and even Bergström as well. Suffice it to say that this didn’t work out, so I was forced to simplify things to just Korrigan.

That solved three problems, but still left me with the most important one, and a big one at that; where do I find someone in the Stavanger region that looks like an English professor with an Imperial moustache? I actually considered buying, or even commissioning, a fake moustache at some point, but I was sure that I had seen someone with an appropriate moustache locally. But where? And when? I searched and I searched, and at one point, through a friend who knows a lot of interesting people, I seemed to have found a near-perfect match; a true anglophile who could provide me with not only the moustache, but tweeds, hats, pipes, the whole works. Unfortunately, he had just taken ill and declined my offer. After more futile searching I decided to call someone I knew personally. He was a far cry from the dandy Englishman I pictured in my head, but he did have a moustache that was close-enough, and being a local actor who worked for a revue he could provide me with his own costumes. I asked him and he was willing to take some time off to pose for me. I counted my blessings. At that point I considered this a huge victory in a project that had been nothing but setbacks and compromises.

Though I was, and still am, extremely grateful for his willingness to support this project, I must admit that the end result was such a far cry from what I had imagined while writing the book that I somewhat despondently carried on with the project worrying that the first official depiction of my new recurring character would be so unfaithful to the book—and done by myself no less! Shortly after, however, my salvation finally came in the form of a poster.

Some crude "storyboard" sketches for the Professor Korrigan photoshoot.

Every year, in the town of Bryne where I live, they have a festival called Potetfestivalen (literally translates to “The Potato Festival”), and at the very top of the posters littered all over the town to inform of the upcoming activities I saw a photo of a man that immediately made me think; “that’s Korrigan!” Granted, an English gentleman like Korrigan would never be caught dead wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap with a picture of an anthropomorphised potato on it, but the slim face, the hawk-like nose, the dark-grey hair, and of course, the moustache, was perfect. With some help from the people running the festival I managed to track down the man on the poster, contacted him, and was thrilled to hear that he was willing to be the face of Professor Korrigan.

His name is Arne Vagle. He is a specialist in grains and potatoes working for the Norwegian Agricultural Advisory Service in Rogaland, and once I had learned of who he was, it quickly dawned on me that I had seen him many times before and that he was most definitely the moustached local man that I previously alluded to. It turns out that Vagle has been present at every Potato Festival since its creation in 1998, where he always presents a colourful assortment of different kinds of potatoes. Although I am admittedly not much of a connoisseur of potatoes, I had definitely seen him at the festival before and had clearly made some mental note of his distinguishable stache that had partially reemerged at the start of this project.

I met Vagle at his office and decorated one of the walls there with a cheap green tarp I had bought the day before to imply that he was sitting within a tent as a part of the archaeological excavation described in the book’s first chapter. After I had snapped a series of photographs here, I asked him if there was a basement or something to that effect that could be used to represent the machine room of the LNG tanker from the opposite end of the book, and he took me down to a locker room with a large metal cabinet and some air vents that that made for a passable backdrop. These photos, taken more-or-less in the dark, came out a little fuzzy, but that only enhanced the moody and grimy look that I wanted.

Two unused photos of Arne Vagle in costume.

There’s not too much to say about the costume Vagle wore. The tweed jacket I found at a 2nd hand store, and the rest was common enough. The pipe and the potsherd on the other hand are both very special and carry a bit of personal history.

The pipe belonged to my great grandfather and has been in the possession of my mother ever since he passed away in the 1970s. In fact, he had several pipes, two classic bent apple ones, a steel tipped jet pipe, and a foldable vest-pocket one for travel. I chose one of the two classical ones, favouring the one with the most noticeable signs of use as it seemed the most suitable for my well-travelled professor.

The piece being examined by Korrigan is part of a collection of real Native American potsherds found in the Arizona desert by my mother in the early 90’s shortly before I was born. Most of these sherds, which have always been on display in my mother’s living room for as long as I can remember, wouldn’t pass for Viking-era pottery, so I chose one of the most neutral ones. My mother, like myself, has always been quite fascinated by history and archaeology, so when I showed her the original photos I took she quickly reminded me that an expert on ancient pottery would focus on the cross-section of the rim in order to determine the overall shape and size, and thereby also the style and era, of the original pot. So, when I later handed the piece to Vagle, I made sure to relay this information to him.

My great-grandfather's pipe and my mother's collection of Native American potsherds.

BUILDING A CRIB ON A BUDGET

I knew early on that the ominous note left behind in the crib by the eco-terrorists would be an important visual motif in the trailer, so it was clear from the beginning that I would have to recreate the photo that Special Agent Marshall hands Professor Korrigan during their first meeting at the start of the book.

The note itself wasn’t a problem, and my mother provided me with the little teddy bear you can see in the top left corner. But what about the crib itself? I didn’t want to spend time and money buying a whole crib, let alone a vintage one, just for a single photo. The answer was a clever no-budget solution I had picked up at the London Film Academy. For a scene set in a prison cell, the director of photography had the clever idea to create the illusion of a barred window by stretching some black electrical tape over an empty frame that we held up to the light, thereby casting long vertical shadows over the actors. For the trailer photo I simply put a bedsheet over a rectangular foam pad, placed the note, the teddy bear, and a blanket that my mother had kept since I was a baby on top of it, then held a metal frame with a few rows of black tape in front of the window on a bright autumn day and snapped my photo.

Rejected photo where the illusion of a crib doesn't quite work.

AN AMERICAN CAR IN NORWAY

I also wanted to actually show the arrival of Marshall at the excavation, the latter of which I knew would have to be represented with a simple stock image which I eventually acquired through the archive at the University in Stavanger. As for the agent himself, since my original plan to include several actors/models never panned out, I decided instead to emphasise the mystery of the situation and figured that his foot stepping out of the car would suffice. The foot, if you were wondering, is mine.

But what of the car? I had a foot (and one to spare), I had some reasonably appropriate footwear, and I could easily find a rural spot to shoot the scene in (there’s plenty of those in Jæren), but you might think that vintage American cars aren't exactly something that everyone has in their garage. Lucky for me, however, I live in the Norwegian countryside, a place practicality riddled with American car enthusiasts. The largest organised group is called Amcar (quite simply short for “American car”). I contacted the local branch and gave a general sense of the type of car I was looking, deciding that this was not a time to be picky about exact models.

I eventually met up with Terje Tytland, the owner of a beautiful 1970 Ford Lincoln Continental. Though fairly different from the Chrysler described in the book, it did have that elongated and blocky silhouette that just screamed early 70s. If Marshall hadn’t gone for the Dodge Polara, this might have been his second choice. So, on an appropriately overcast day we took the car out to a country road where I snapped a few pictures of the car and he snapped a few of me stepping out of it.

A closer shot of the Ford Lincoln Continental that was not used in the trailer.

OILY GEODES

The meteorite shown in the trailer was another lucky no-budget solution. In 2008, while visiting some friends in the US, we went geode hunting in a stream in Illinois. During the drive we were given a rundown of what we might find—our “guides” had done this sort of thing many times before and had practically become experts—and explained that there were supposedly some geodes that contained raw oil, though they had never seen this. We hiked down to the stream, found several stones of varying sizes, cracked a few open, but one proved particularly tough, so we brought it back to our friends’ house and later that evening we took turns trying to break it open. The hammer passed from person to person, sparks literally flew from the rock as the hammer hit it, and eventually, as if it finally yielded to our curiosity, it neatly divided into two almost equally sized halves and a glob of black liquid splotched onto the pavement. It was actually filled with oil! You can still see dried up oil in the cracks of the odd, almost organic-looking interior of this strange geode, and we were told that the larger oil stain remained visible on the pavement for the better part of a year after we’d left.

Although the coarse, grey surface of this river rock is technically another incongruity with the novel, where it’s described as a smooth obsidian-like stone, it did fit most people’s preconception of what a meteorite should look like, and with its weird-looking interior revealed in cross-section, I decided to once again not squander a good opportunity with nitpicking.

The basement of my mother’s workplace just so happened to still have a bunch of furniture and random bits of equipment from the 70s and 80s scattered about, and provided a perfect backdrop for the scene where Bergström, also played by me, sneaks into the geology lab of the drill rig and places the stone on the table. Likewise, the rusty metal floor seen in the background when the stone is picked up (this time by my mother) was simply a small landing between two stairs near a restaurant a few blocks away from where I live that I felt had a nice industrial look to it. Yet another simple no-budget solution.

A normal river stone, a common geode, and a not so common geode. The black marks on the geode on the right are what's left of the crude oil.

THE CHILD

The last image seen in the trailer was actually one of the first things I photographed.

The solution was quite simple, though I must say, quite absurd looking in person. I purchased a baby doll from a second-hand store, got some black fishing line from a sports store, and I simply hung the doll from some air vents in the parking garage of the apartment building where I live. I suspended some black blankets with some old clothes hangers (and some tape) around one entrance to this little shortcut passage between two sections of the garage in order to block out the light from one side and to make sure that the bright light from the other would make the doll just a silhouette.

The end result was…passable. It was certainly strange.

But with some photoshopping it not only ended up looking quite retro, but had that surreal, X-Files inspired look that I was going for. In hindsight, though, there was so little left of the original aesthetic that I doubt if the B&W film made much of a difference.

Left: Probably one of the oddest BTS photos that has been taken of me. Right: The original B&W photo before it was photoshopped beyond recognition.

ODDS AND ENDS

Finally, just to be thorough, and in case some of you were wondering, here’s a brief explanation of the remaining photos that, in my opinion, didn’t have enough of a story behind them to warrant giving them their own section.

The house and the stairs representing the home of the kidnapped child were two separate locations, with the latter belonging to an artist friend of mine who not only lived in a house from the 70s but who collects all things odd and retro, such as the radio and the old Dole cardboard box that you can see at the bottom and top of the stairs. The house seen from the outside belongs to some old friends of my mother.

The stone circle is an actual pre-historic stone circle in Egersund which I have already written about in detail in my article about the Locations that Inspired The Starseed.

The two photos of the Aker H3 drill rig, and of the petroleum workers within, are historical stock photos generously provided by Norsk Oljemuseum (The Norwegian Petroleum Museum). 

And finally, though I did both the photo and the video editing myself, the rest of the post-production phase was largely done through people I know via The London Film Academy (the sound editing was done in Norway by Bibow Audio, who worked on both of my 2022 short films). The music was composed by Isabel Woodings, who was recommended to my by the co-producer and 2nd unit director of my short film Paradox, Oscar Hewitt, who on this project was also responsible for the voice-over recording.

The narration was done by voice actor David Mander, whom I discovered through an online casting process. The recording took place at the London Film Academy with Hewitt organising what can best be described as "long-distance-directing," meaning I directed the whole affair via Google Meet while Hewitt and Mander were together in the studio in London. Contrary to much of the analogue process used in the making of this trailer, this final step was a very modern solution that worked surprisingly well.