Well, it’s been a little over a week and I’m extremely proud to announce that principle photography for Troll Bridge is wrapped!  Finished!  Finito!  Troll Bridge the Moving Picture is in the can, as they say!

After six epic weeks of set construction with Nightshade FX at Wicked of Oz Studios, we spent 5 solid days shooting all the action that occurs on and around the bridge.  For some people like our awesome lead actor and make-up team, this resulted in 12 hour days to accommodate getting in and out of the prosthetics.  Six weeks of set construction.  Five days of shooting.  Insane.

Given that everyone working on this, has donated their time and talents for free, I can’t even possibly begin to thank or praise everyone enough!  I know myself and a few other key crew members have come down with a horrendous flu directly after shooting… our body’s way of saying we pushed hard enough to make this film as awesome as possible.  :)

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank some of our corporate sponsors.  Quality Theatre Supplies for providing and installing our awesome green screen curtain, Wicked of Oz Studios for giving us a home to build over the past two months (and helping us during every step of the process), and lastly Inspiration Studios for offering their camera equipment, knowledge and advice.  The camera we shot on is the same model that Peter Jackson is currently shooting The Hobbit on. Spectacular quality and our camera department executed some incredible footage with it!

I'm not going to go through and name everyone who did amazing work on this shoot – the list at this point would be stupidly long and impossible to read – but you can see them all tagged in the production photos we've been uploading to Facebook.  Check them out and tell them how awesome they are – they deserve it!

Yes, we’ve also uploaded the photos to Flickr for those who prefer to be off the grid.  You can check those out here.  :)

One person I’d like to call out though is Troll Bridge producer Ahren Morris.  The work load and dedication he has given towards making any of this production possible is staggering – and I think warrants special note.  Without him, Troll Bridge would just be a whole heap of talented people running around and smacking into one another.  If anyone is the backbone for Troll Bridge, it’s this guy.  Thank you Ahren.  For absolutely everything!

So where does that all land us now?

Post-production.   We've still got a heap of work ahead of us, we’re not out of the woods yet, but I think it’s safe to say we've certainly broken the back of this film.  It’s all downhill from here (even if that hill is a particularly large one).  Once we get the offline edit completed, and distributed amongst our various post-production departments we'll have a better idea on time frame for release.

If you want to be involved with post, get in touch!  The beauty with post is it can be quiet the global effort.

So… in the meantime – check out our photos from the shoot!  It’s been an incredible journey thus far, and I can’t wait to see what the next phase brings us!

Daniel Knight
Director of Troll Bridge

Here's another time lapse video for you all, this time of our FX Supervisor building a green screen!

Because we don't have the architectural expertise to build a real bridge spanning two impossibly large cliffs (or for that matter the OH&S budget), we're going to have to fake most of it in post production.  As such we're only building the portion of the bridge where the actual action of the film actually takes place.  We'll be enhancing it's length and depth later on with the aid of miniatures and matte paintings... and we're very much looking forward to it!  :)

So the green screen (which is on installed movable tracks and covers half of the bridge at any one time), gives us a nice area to erase and fill in later on with true epicness.

We've been very lucky with Speciality Theatre Supplies getting involved, and getting us some wonderful discounts in getting this done.  :)

Here's the video:

Just thought we drop you a video update on our first two weeks of bridge set construction!  Still many more weeks to go leading up to the shoot!

Construction start times were at 7:30am, and finish times were at 6:30pm.  Clearly a lot of work has been crammed into the following two and a half minutes.  It's great to see the bridge finally start to take shape!  :)

Just some photos from a Troll Bridge rehearsal we had on Saturday.  We also took it as an opportunity to grab some audio so we can build an animatic of the scene before we shoot.

Here we once again have Cohen as played by Don Bridges, and introducing John Jenkins as Mica, Troy Larkin as Beryl, and Glenn Van Oosterom as The Horse.

You can find more photos here.