Penny Dreadful number 2: The Scayrecrow is now complete (in a festival length edit just under 12 minutes)… and has been handed over to Exeter Phoenix and Devon County council. Screening dates will be posted shortly.
Huge thanks to everyone who has aided its completion; especially Mick Grierson and James Harrod.
Following initial costume shoots and preliminary background work, the following images are available to provide an idea of the finished short. Also included is the first poster design.
From here on in its nose to the grindstone…with November dates set for preliminary edit and sound work with Mick Grierson.
Short teaser trailer now available online (see trailers via film clips). The trailer was created as publicity for the Project Greenlight project and features footage that will not appear in the finished short.
Performers from the Dymchurch ‘Day of Syn’ re-enactment society help out in redcoat and pub tavern cronies duties for ‘Scayrecrow‘. Many thanks to all the people who kindly consented to be photographed in period costume to be used as extras in the animated short. Thanks especially to Heather (who featured on horseback as Dr Syn / Scayrecrow) and whose willingness to gallop up and down the beachfront will aid towards the dramatic chase finale.
www.dymchurchdayofsyn.org.uk/
‘Scayrecrow‘, second short animated film in the Penny Dreadful project, wins the Project Greenlight bursary award.
Co-funded by Exeter Phoenix arts centre and Devon County council, the award aims to allow South West based film makers to develop and produce a short film which will subsequently be screened at the Exeter Phoenix during 2008.
As with the series first entry ‘The Vampire‘, ‘Scayrecrow’ will be a blend of photographed / roto-scoped images and hand painted cells and backgrounds. Location shooting will be based in Devon and also around Dymchurch, Kent (home of the Thorndike character ‘Dr Syn’). The film itself is a tragic love story, stylistically inspired by Hammer’s output in the early 60’s.
The Penny Dreadful or the Penny bloods were sensational stories published in weekly parts. Usually with an emphasis on the terrible and the fantastic and often inspired by gothic melodramas of the time, the bloods were an important feature of Victorian sub culture.
Though once prolific, these items and the stories within are now scarce. The subjects once familiar, are now (bar Sweeney Todd and Dick Turpin perhaps) all but forgotten. Characters like ‘Spring heel Jack’, once a household name, are now esoteric.
Cultures may change in time and place, but the roots of culture remain the same. Like any story they exist through their telling and the bloods are not the only legacy that has passed with a generation. Many folk stories and communal legends once integral to the fabric of a regional, and perhaps national, identity are being lost because they are simply not being passed from one generation to the next.
Carrion film seeks to redress that.
Each film will draw from neglected local legends and aspects of the early Penny Dreadful’s. Some, like the phantom coach of Okehampton castle, have been drawn from folk songs. Some were once part of a shared English mythology, such as ‘the Lambton worm’, but have since slipped into obscurity outside the region that spawned them.
The diversity of these tales lies testament to the richness of our folklore’s heritage.
These then are simply new ways to tell old tales… but they are tales worth telling.
‘Once upon a time…there were local legends and folk songs about monsters. There were execution chapbooks and there were penny dreadfuls…
For a century these stories have been all but forgotten….until now.’
