‘Men in Shorts’ Filmstar interview – Ashley Thorpe

A creepy kid, no, I was a sweet kid…it all went wrong and I developed into a creepy adult!…ha ha. No, I actually had a great childhood I grew up next to  playing fields so I spent a lot of time out climbing trees, building dens, hitting people with sticks, y’know, all the normal stuff. I read a lot of comics, I especially loved 2000AD, I guess the only thing that I was obsessional about was ‘monsters’ – I spent pretty much all my time drawing them and in between pretending to be chased by them. I also had this weird thing wherein whenever I was playing with my toys or inventing games for my friends to play, I always used to pretend that what we were playing was being seen by someone, almost as if it was being broadcast somewhere. I actually used to make sure that it would ‘end on a cliffhanger’ ha ha. So I actually imagined that when I grew up I would make something similar to the Ray Harryhausen films. It was only a little later that the horror aspect of the monstrous seduced me completely.

It’s absolutely that in fact. ‘Scayrecrow’ has a lot more hand-painted elements than ‘Screaming skull’ (which is primarily digital photography). ‘Scayrecrow’ is first and foremost painted backgrounds with roto-scoped actors matted onto / into them. There are a few sequences wherein that process is reversed ; the first appearance of the scayrecrow, galloping out of the gloom after his death for instance, where the character on horseback is painted over a rotoscoped image of  a tree-lined road which was photographed on the edge of Dartmoor. So it’s a play between those two elements really. It is a very time consuming process, but it was  an illustrated look I was aiming for, partially it was born out of naivety and also I was always a fan of Ralph Bakshi’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and its rotoscoped sequences -finished or not –   I thought it gave the piece an eerie quality, especially to the Ring Wraiths. Perhaps it’s because rotoscope is between disciplines – it’s real but it’s not, which, bearing in mind my films are all about legends, the play between truth and fantasy,  it seemed quite apt.

In ‘Scayrecrow’ not that much actually, the majority of it (bar the actors) is all hand painted. The individual layers were assembled and manpulated in photoshop and then edited in After effects to give it additional movement. For ‘Screaming Skull’ however it was shot digitally and then manipulated digitally too. The main reason for this being that I wanted it to have a grungy 70’s British horror look. I wanted it to have that wonderful washed out fungal look that films of that era have. I also wanted it to be a slight departure from ‘Scayrecrow’ as tonally the material is quite different, not so playful.

I’m proud or ashamed to say that I actually did quite a lot of research! I absolutely love the 18thC period so it was a bit of a dream project for me. I had a lot of fun researching the costumes, the coaches etc. I even took the time to shoot sections of the film in and around locales  that appeared in Thorndikes’s ‘Dr Syn’ novels down in Kent. There are also  lot of ‘period in jokes,’ I guess you’d call them, thrown in there – the most obvious example being Rookwood is the name of Ainsworth’s hero in his 19thC novel that made Dick Turpin a house hold name. There are a lot of visual references too, everything from the original Penny dreadfuls to Tim Burton. There’s a lot of Richard Carpenters ‘Dick Turpin’ too. I loved that show when I was a kid. But in terms of the story the single thing that influenced ‘Scayrecrow’ was ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. I absolutely approached ‘Scayrecrow’ from the angle of a gothic romance.

We’ll see after this interview, ha ha! Well, I thought that the penny dreadful’s were ostensibly cheap and accessible so the most obvious modern counterparts are digital downloads and, though the films play great in cinemas, I actually love the idea of people watching and sharing the films on their i-Pods and all that. You can download them for £2.99 each from www.carrionfilms.co.uk. So far the response has been pretty good. We’ve had sales from everywhere from the U.S to Japan. As to whether it’s the way forward for filmmakers…I don’t know. Music is increasingly moving that way, so why not short film?

It’s based upon a very famous Dartmoor legend about a haunted stretch of road called the B3212. Drivers upon that particular highway, have been assaulted by a pair of spectral hands that grip the wheel of the car and steer their vehicle from the road. It was a tale that gained popularity in the 1920’s when a Governor from Dartmoor prison died on that stretch whilst taking his daughters to work in his motorbike and sidecar. They survived. he did not. As a consequence the story swept Britain for a brief time and has subsequently become something of a legend on Dartmoor.
It’s another neglected British myth which I’m hoping to expose to a wider audience. It’s about to begin shooting, is being funded by the UK Film council and South west screen. and I’m very happy to say that it’s being produced by Tom Atkinson (’10 pound horror film’).
My angle on this one is that it’s going to be a horror movie that ostensibly takes place in a moving vehicle. It’s hopefully going to be quite Hitchcock, very sixties, with a fantastic John Barry / Bernard Herrmann – esque soundtrack by my wonderful composer Mick Grierson. I’m hoping to deliver by about Halloween this year.