Date: Sunday 16th August 2009

Place: A fruit farm in deepest Kent

Present: AD Lane, 16 crew members, 4 actors, 11 extras, 1 actor’s girlfriend, and me

The weather could not have been better: the sky a deep azure blue, and the sun glistening on the newly applied fake blood. A number of inhumanly pale farm labourers pick apples for their co-worker to sell to equally sickly-looking passers-by. Another labourer, in a boiler suit, gazes into the distance, the smoke from his cigarette swirling around his head and momentarily masking his peeling flesh.

And Vincent de Paula, Director of Photography, glides slowly past with his camera.

This is the first time AD Lane has sat in the director’s chair since graduation and you might have expected him to look a little nervous. Instead he seemed totally at ease, chatting happily with crew, and cast during the breaks, and introducing himself to each and every extra to ensure they felt comfortable. This is my only experience of a real shoot but I was struck by the overwhelming calmness of the proceedings. I had expected the long periods of hanging about, whilst equipment was set up, or cast walked through their part, but I was surprised by how polite everyone was even during the actual filming. It was all please and thank you and there was the most delightfully gentlemanly discussion between Director, Assistant Director and Director of Photography at the end of filming before the Assistant announced, almost apologetically, ‘I think that we have a wrap.’

Maybe this was the reason why Antony brought the filming in under budget and in less time than expected. Another might be the commitment of everyone involved. You only had to listen into a tiny part of the chatter to realise that everyone there was a zombie freak. Take the young couple who had driven over two hours from Hertfordshire just to be extras. They get married in early September and yet they found time to take part. They get married in September and yet they have already invested £450 in the film and want to invest more when they know how much they have left after the honeymoon! And they didn’t even want a speaking role; they just wanted to be part of a zombie film. Now, that is true dedication and you have to believe, with that sort of support, Antony can’t fail.

So what of the trailer itself? I’m sworn to secrecy, and anyway I didn’t see the morning’s filming. But I can tell you it will feature the film’s heroes in Leslie Simpson and Efisia Fele (otherwise known as Fangoria’s Penny B Dreadful) along with the cigarette smoking zombie, Frank Jakeman. Antony is hoping to get it out in time for Hallowe’en, preferably previewing it at a festival and you can be sure that it will raise more questions than it will provide answers. The intention is to keep the punters guessing right to the film’s release.

I’ll let you know when the trailer is available, but if you want to get a preview then you will have to dig into your pocket and sign up to one of Antony’s producer packages (www.theindywoodproject.com). You too could be a zombie then, since all producers will be invited to be extras in the film itself. Oh, and don’t think you need to be a zombie freak to be involved either. It turns out they really are a very friendly bunch with more than a slight penchant for Nice biscuits!

[View with PicLens]

While GI Joe technically has its roots in the Vietnam War, the current version of the Real American Heroes was started in 1982, when Hasbro launched a toy line featuring a team of GI Joes and their arch-nemeses, Cobra.  In an unprecedented marketing move, a Saturday-morning cartoon and Marvel comic book were launched alongside the toys; while some cross-promotional marketing of toys, toons, and comics existed before that, it really served to introduce the modern area of toy promotion.  Legend has it that comic writer Larry Hama created Cobra, which proved to be an essential part of the success of both the cartoon and the toy line.

After this proved a huge success, Hasbro repeated the formula two years later, remaking and repackaging old Japanese robot toys and again having Marvel comics writers develop a backstory explaining the nature of the toys and their conflict.  In an interesting parallel, both series’ comics outlasted both the toy lines and the cartoons, and both helped to show that under the right creators (Larry Hama for Joe and Simon Furman for Transformers), licensed media was capable of producing comics equal to a lot of what the “big two” were producing at the time.

With this parallel history and shared corporate roots, hypothetical discussions about the winner of GI Joe and Transformer battles quickly became a matter of debate for playground sages everywhere; Marvel eventually gave in to demand and produced GI Joe and the Transformers, a four-issue crossover series.   After the type of initial misunderstanding typically found in comics stories, the Joes and Autobots teamed up to stop an allied Cobra and the Decepticons from dominating the world.

Page from GI Joe vs Transformers - Image Comics, Sep 2003

Aside from the comic crossover, the only other crossover between the two occurred in the Transformers episode Only Human, where a thinly-disguised Cobra Commander transforms several Autobots into human form.  As Cobra Commander was voiced by Chris Latta, the same actor who voiced Starscream, this was an easy crossover to accomplish.

The crossover series was a huge success, and when the rights to both series passed onto later publisher, such as Dreamwave and Devil’s Due, the idea of crossing the two series over went with them.  Those crossover series have, as a rule, featured gorgeous artwork, such as the Jae Lee-drawn WWII series, but horrendous storylines, such as the US military building an “organic robot” named SerpentO.R. from biomechanical samples of Megatron.  These series have also uniformly been financial successes, and the current license holder for both, IDW Publishing, has expressed interest in revisiting the concept as well.

All of which brings us to today.  Both properties seem remarkably prescient: Transformers with is war over control of limited fuel resources, and GI Joe with its fight against international terrorism.  Combine that with the often rose-coloured nostalgia of the current generation, and you’ve got a recipe for success as guaranteed as the accuracy of blue lasers.

The Rainbow Orchid

JE Towey talks to cartoonist and author, Garen Ewing, creator of The Rainbow Orchid.

At some point in our childhood, or perhaps only in our mythical childhood, didn’t we all spend winter Sunday afternoons, curled up beside a roaring log fire with tea and toast and an Asterix or Tintin book, doing our utmost to ensure that the warm butter dripping down our chins didn’t sully those precious pages?

Now Egmont, who still publish the Tintin books, have taken a punt on a young Briton, called Garen Ewing, to bring us The Rainbow Orchid, a new take on that experience. I thought you’d like to know what makes a 21st century cartoon artist do such a thing. So, off I went on my travels down Southern England’s A roads once more, to find Garen and have a chat.

Now, the first thing you discover about Garen is he’s a gentleman. My car was reporting an external temperature of 28.5 degrees when I arrived; Garen offered me a choice of cold drinks, ushered me to a comfy sofa in his front room and opened the conversation with the kind of selfless questions that immediately puts someone at ease.

And there is something quintessentially gentlemanly about Garen’s attitude to his art too. He combines a quiet confidence in his graphical abilities with an almost unnerving modesty about his command of colour. Indeed he confesses that the limited palette used for The Rainbow Orchid was a product of his own uncertainty and a suggestion from his wife to keep to the Dulux Heritage range of colours! For my part, I don’t care how he got there. The combination of simple, but assured, line drawings, and flat, muted colouring is what gives The Rainbow Orchid its exquisitely enchanting quality.

But, please, don’t be misled by all this talk of colour palettes and enchantment, nor even the title, The Rainbow Orchid. For this is not some saccharine tale of fairies or cutesy magical flowers. This is a fast moving adventure tale, with action and intrigue, mystery and suspense, a plucky young hero and a beautiful heroine, an ancient, priceless sword and a mythical plant.

The story opens in the 1920s at the home of Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey and immediately the reader is plunged into a Conan Doyle world of wealthy amateurs living in elegant London terraces. Young Julius Chancer, Sir Alfred’s assistant, has just returned from an eight month assignment to recover the manuscript of a lost Purcell opera; an assignment, we learn, that has been fraught with the kind of difficulties and danger a modern audience would associate with the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mummy film franchises.

The filmic references are not out of place. Garen is a fan, particularly, of the early silent films, whose combination of story-telling imagery and written titles, bear more than a passing similarity with comic books. He cites an example from Chaplin’s 1931 film ‘City Lights’ where Chaplin plays a tramp who falls for a blind flower girl, as illustrating how Chaplin, as both writer and director as well as actor, uses emotion and gesture to tell the story. It is a technique he uses to great effect in his book: he seems to take particular delight in the use of eyebrow gesture, for example. (A particular favourite of mine is the sequence of scenes where one of the secondary characters gets his hand stuck in a Phoenician vase.) And this interest in early films is, he confesses, one of the reasons for setting the story in the 1920s.

All of this is, of course, a far cry from the vast majority of comic books currently available. US, superhero and manga comic books all make use of a bold and vivid colour palette. They shout at the reader, especially when depicting action and violence. Garen shows violence too, but he uses restraint and economy of line. There is, for example, a subtly simple panel showing a fist ramming into a man’s jaw and making his head vibrate. The violence implied by a few, apparently, casual lines is breathtaking and far more memorable than the Wham Bam violence with which we are all more familiar.

Talking to Garen, though, it is clear, that the differences do not just lie in the subtlety of line and colour. There are huge differences in how the books are conceived and created too. Garen is wedded to the idea that a comic book should be the product of one creative personality. This concept came to him over twenty years ago when he was pitching his portfolio at a comics festival, and realised that he could never achieve what he wanted if all he did was make drawings for other people’s words. So he builds up his books, bit by bit, partly with a script, partly with a few sketches until he has a firm hold of what is happening in each scene. This is a far cry from the more usual, almost production line, process where even the art content is broken down into pencil, ink, colour, etc and each is carried out by a different person.

I could go on a lot longer telling you more about the story of The Rainbow Orchid or outlining Garen’s biography. But there really is no need. You see, another aspect of Garen’s gentlemanly nature is his generosity. Take a look at his web-site. There you will find excerpts from Volume 1 and 2, fascinating video footage of Garen creating one of the strips, chunks of biography, links to interviews and reviews and a members section where you can sign up for newsletters and the opportunities to win original art work. Have a browse and I think you will see what I mean.

All that’s left for me now is to tell you that Volume 1 of The Rainbow Orchid is to be published on August 4th. Volume 2 will follow early next year, and Garen is soon to start work on Volume 3. So pop that date into your diary and make sure you get a copy. And if the cover alone doesn’t make you think of hot buttered toast, then you must have had a pretty miserable childhood!

Is this going to be a treat or what? Take English literature’s most surreal author and apply cinema’s most surreal director. Then add two of the spookiest actors in Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter for good measure. Forget cute. Forget fluffy. Carroll was never like that in the first place and the director of Nightmare before Christmas and Sweeney Todd is hardly likely to fail him. Just take a look at the concept art and you’ll get the picture. Only Burton could make roses look stuck-up and smug like that. Only he could turn a masterpiece of Victorian gardening into a threatening morass of riotous vegetation. But I digress…

Written by Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, among others), the script opens with a 17 year old Alice (played by 19 year old Australian actress, Mia Wasikowska) attending a swanky party on Victorian estate. Faced with hundreds of snooty upper-class suitors, she runs away and finds herself following a talking white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) down a hole and into the Wonderland she last visited 10 years earlier.

The story thereafter sounds like it will be a mixture of both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice follows the Rabbit and her size keeps changing as in Wonderland. But she meets with the major characters from Looking Glass, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the Red and White Queens (Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway). The Mad Hatter (Depp) of course appears in both stories anyway.

The filming, which took 40 days, was completed in December and since then Burton has been merging the live action with CGI and motion-capture creatures and turning it all into 3-D. The completed film is due to premiere on 5th March 2010. Can you wait until then? I’m not sure I can.

What do you do if you’re a young British film-maker, driven by a burning desire to make a film and you are determined to retain control of the concept, the script and cinematography?  Well, if you’re AD Lane you bring your well-honed entrepreneurial skills to bear on the problem and come up with an innovative internet-based funding campaign that in 6 weeks has already raised £6,500 towards his target of £100,000 plus.

We at ThePhantomZone wanted to know more about the man behind this spoof zombie film, THE INVASION OF THE NOT QUITE DEAD, and his independent film company, the Indywood Project. So your intrepid hack braved the vicissitudes of the A224 to find Antony Lane holed up in his cosy front room complete with ominous treadmill, computer persistently emitting email bleeps, new Wii, and a couple of black and white cats. Resisting these distractions, we settled down to chat.

Antony Lane, happily oblivious to what's going on behind him

Antony is passionate about film. He’s been a consumer for years. And not just any consumer. With his mum, he set up and ran Clockwork DVD, the first shop to sell DVDs in the Grimsby area. He stocked it in the beginning with his own DVD collection, offering to provide new copies to order within three days. All the DVDs were American format, there being so few British ones available at the time. After a year the shop was fully stocked and he then started up the first DVD rental service in the area. Sometime later, after legislation changes and competition from the big DVD rental chains forced the closure of the shop, he also ran an ebay DVD shop. This experience was to prove invaluable when it came to designing a fund raising campaign for Invasion.

Selling and renting DVDs also provided Antony’s early film education and made him realise that what he really wanted to do was to make films himself. So he signed up for a degree at the International Film School, Wales in Newport where he came into contact with Ken Russell (visiting professor) and Justin Kerrigan (alumnus and director of Human Traffic).  Talking to them about their experiences opened his eyes to the film industry and encouraged him to become an independent film-maker. The Indywood project was born!

His avid viewing of films and DVDs over the years has provided Antony with a very firm idea of what he wants to achieve with Invasion. Listening to him talk about Tony Scott’s film The Hunger, or the Spierig brothers’ Undead, makes you realise that for Antony, two things are important above all else: a really good strong story and superb cinematography. Indeed, his major criticism of much of what falls within the horror genre is that it is either badly written or badly filmed or both. He is particularly vociferous about the hand-held almost home movie type of horror film that has been spawned by the Blair Witch Project. And he has few good words for mainstream blockbusters like Drag Me to Hell, where the gore is more important than the characters.

One of the movie posters

So expect something rather more thoughtful and rather more polished from Invasion. To that end Antony has already lined up two potential cinematographers, both of whom have worked on movies he respects. As to the story, Antony has written the screenplay himself, and, if he has doubts about anything, I sense that it is the screenplay that most worries him. He’s had the thumbs up from Ken Russell and the actors who have seen it and that should encourage him. My own view is that his lack of complacency is a good sign and with the crew that is assembling itself around him, he has very little need for concern.

All he needs to do now is find the finance. And that’s where the entrepreneurial skills Antony developed selling DVD come to the fore. His Twitter campaign is the first of its kind. He now has about 8000 followers and is raising between £750 and £1000 a week, largely through the sale, at £20 a go, of pre-ordered DVDs, along with a zombie photo-makeover and an opportunity for UK residents to take part in the film as an extra. Six weeks into the campaign, over 170 people from all over the world had already signed up for this, this hack included!

At the same time he has also auctioned a sizeable chunk of his 2,500+ DVD collection on ebay, and has secured funding and sponsorship from a number of local, national and international businesses. Indeed, the Indywood project is about to go truly national with newspaper coverage imminent and a BBC documentary due to be aired in a few months.

Now he has had another marketing idea and has teamed up with an illustrator to produce an online cartoon strip which will fill in the back story, taking the villain from Switzerland in 1978, when the meteor falls and the populace is infected, up to the present day on an island 20 miles off the coast of England. It’s likely the cartoon will be made available free to all those who have helped fund the film and maybe at a price to others. So, there you go, another incentive to get involved and about as much information about the plot of the film that you are likely to get anywhere!

And when will investors start to see what they have funded? Antony is planning to begin filming a teaser trailer in four or five weeks. This will, of course, be part of the fund-raising exercise, but it will also allow all us investors to get a better feel for how the film will look. Then, all being well, he hopes to start filming proper early in 2010. He plans to do some of it in Kent, largely to say thank you for the support he has received from the local community, but he will also film in the Brecon Beacons, the Isles of Scilly, and, funding permitting, the Alps.

Lastly, here’s the Scoop! Invasion of the Not Quite Dead is not a stand-alone project. Very few people know this yet but Invasion is only the first film of a trilogy. So expect to see more innovative fund raising campaigns coming from Antony’s direction: he’s got two more films to finance after this one!