The Blade’s Edge
Synopsis: While on a hike through a forest, a young man sees a bright light shining between the trees. The light entices him to keep moving forward to where an old sword lies in the dirt. He’s compelled to pick it up, soon realizing that this is sword carries with it, a curse. Despite his better judgement, the young man cannot walk away from the sword. A decision which will force him to defend his life with The Blade’s Edge.
Production Notes: We made this film as an entry for the tv show, “On the Lot”. Someone had mentioned to me that this new tv show was taking entries from budding new filmmakers and I figured why not give it a shot. The only bad thing was, by the time I had heard about this opportunity, we had only 2 weeks to turn in a film for the deadline. So David and I sat down and wanted to try and do something different. We wanted to do a film in the fantasy genre but we needed to keep it simple. So we came up with the very simple, minimal dialogue script and I got to order some swords and costume pieces. David created by hand, the leather armor for the Roman soldier costume that went over the shoulders, the forearms and the shins (also known as the pauldrons, bracers and greaves to you fantasy geeks). David also made the leather belt, booties and lacing for the Barbarian costume. That’s how it is in Flying Dork Productions, everyone gets to be many things and David wasn’t quite off the hook yet...he got to be the “lead” character in the movie. So with the main role cast, we looked for someone we knew would look like a Barbarian...we called up Billy. When he heard he got to swing an axe at David...he was in.
After getting the costumes together, David, Billy and I drove out to a nice forested area, parked the car and took a hike. We went walking through looking for a good spot where we would be out of the way of other visitors in the area. The perfect place was across the rushing water of a stream and through some thick brush. So with a sigh, Billy and David help carry the gear over and we get started. As we get going we realize, that I left a few pieces of Davids Roman soldier costume so try to get a hold of my Dad to see if he can come out and drop it off to us. What made this great was that Billy took my cell phone and scrambled to the top of a hill within clear view of hikers and nature lovers walking through the area. This wouldn’t of been so awkward if Billy wasn’t dressed like a Germanic Barbarian, sitting in tall grass with a cell phone to his ear. Then he hikes back to my car, still dressed as a Barbarian and meets my Dad outside the forested park to retrieve the costume pieces. With all of the props finally in hand, we shot everything just me, a Roman soldier/music composer/costume designer and a Barbarian. We hiked it back out to my car just as the sun was getting ready to go down.
Once I got to editing, I realized a major problem. Since we didn’t have a boom mic operator, we recorded all the sound directly into the camera with an external mic mounted on top of the camera. Most of the audio that was captured didn’t came out so well. So David and I recreated almost every sound for the movie. There is not one original piece of captured audio throughout the entire film. It was a really long night of recording sounds like a sword dropping in dirt to armor rustling during a run. It was a lot of work but given our resources, the time frame and some of the issues, I am still proud with how it all turned out.
-Jeremy
Check Out the Blade’s Edge DVD Cover