Crown of the Forest

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Posted on: December 4, 2009

Posted in: Action, Drama, Fantasy, Fiction, Period, Video

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At least once in every writer’s/director’s life should he/she write a sword fantasy. It is a genre rife with cliches that lends itself to an immense variety of stories. Because sometimes cliches work. In fact, saying that something is a cliche, is a cliche.

Don’t tell me Lord of the Rings doesn’t have its share of cliches. If anything, it is the Lord of Cliches. Like Bram Stocker established the vampire rules and cliches, J. R. R. Tolkien established the dragons, wizards and dungeons worlds, by which all others are measured.

Crown of the Forest follows this concept on a small scale. It is a brief glimpse into a world of fantasy, a short moment of an encounter of a few mysterious characters in a forest. There is a massive back story that could be fleshed out, but for this short series of 3 parts, we only get to see this one brief glimpse:

In a land ravaged by a war, a lone prince seeks to find a mysterious tribe of people residing deep within a forest to remind them of a covenant between their people and end this war. Along the way he must overcome his own fears, doubts and traitors.

Shot on location in Northern California near the Paradise Hollows Resort, the film makes great use of its epic environment that shows that Jackson shot LotR in New Zealand only out of personal convenience. The film’s writer/actor Brian Walton tells on his production blog of the shoot:

We had to lug our equipment down to the southern edge of that valley and quite a bit of it we hid under tarps for the entirety of the week. Because there was only a director, three producers, and a DP, all of the actors had to help drag sandbags, generators, dollies, and jib arms across the mile of marshy (because it was springtime) valley floor. Not to mention the two days of shooting under a waterfall.

We battled snow, an equipment truck stuck in mud for days, an integral actor dropping out at the last minute, (the part was taken over quite admirably by our producer Marlene Velius) and yet still we finished the shoot both happy and ahead of schedule.

It was all well worth it. Bringing in a jib is a rare equipment for a web show but a standard for a short-film (which is the true nature of Crown), and the difference shows. Some of the takes feel smoother and more cinematic this way.

All involved in this project became web series professionals after Crown: writer/actor Brian Walton starred in both seasons of the cult-classic Catclysmo and later wrote the hilarious Trunk, while director William Hellmuth helmed The Black Dawn which is currently in its first nationwide run on the AMGTV network, and musician Curtis Schweitzer became the driving force behind the score of Cataclysmo and The Black Dawn.

Crown may not be filled with epic battle sequences or impressive CGI, but the short glimpse into this fantasy world is still interesting. The writing is good in a George Lucas- sort of way (take that as you will), the acting good enough for it being a film made by Americans attempting a genre that is by definition European (take that also as you will).

Crown is a short film that could be developed into more. It was the proving grounds for a lot of great film makers, and where they failed, they made up for it in their subsequent projects. I hereby predict much awesome in the future of these guys!