One could say that the whole concept for Troll2357 originated in November of 2014. A writing tutor set us the task of writing a story based on the title 'The Wizard's Daughter' or a number of other titles. I decided I preferred the title 'The Wizard's Daughter' so I mulled that one over.
At the time I was reading true disturbing stories about young people, girls mainly but certainly not exclusive to that gender, killing themselves due to comments made by absolute strangers... To anyone who grew up prior to the age of the Internet this is a bizarre concept to accept. That some person whom you don't even know, doesn't know you and likely never will, can undermine your feelings to the point where you decide it is no longer worth living. Whatismore, on the rare occasion that these 'trolls' are tracked down and confronted by those tormented, they don't care and act like the whole thing is a joke.
This got my blood boiling and I couldn't get it out of my head, so if I was writing a story that week it had to be on that subject. I started to imagine what I might do if a relative of mine killed themselves in reaction to trollific comments. I imagined tracking down that troll, kidnapping him, tying him to a chair and cutting out his eyeballs to feed them to him (okay it was damned severe but I was wrapped in anger and hatred at the time).
The result was the short story 'Troll2357'. I would publish this in my sci-fi fantasy anthology Fantastic Fiction: Volume One. Incidentally, that is available as an ebook here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/566647
(the latest version of Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle-dbs/fd/kcp)
Alas it is far more difficult to connect with people these days with merely writing, unless you have a name they recognise or are writing something that can be easily recognised by genre cliches. We knew the concept of the story was too important to just leave it as a story that few people may ever read.
The first step was to find an actor who would be convincing as the troll (we already had the Wizard and had a Cheryl in mind). For almost six months we searched, posting and reposting the casting call. Actors would contact us through Facebook, we would send them a couple of pages of script, they would do a reading, usually filmed by a friend on a smartphone, and then send it back to us. It wasn't that the acting was bad for anyone who applied really, its just that there was nothing that made me sit up in my seat.
That was until this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4fFkoDCE00
It was the first audition video that made me sit up in my seat. I was impressed by Nigel Goodwin's range of emotion. He managed to show me facial expressions that I hadn't even imagined and yet seemed so right for the scene. So we cast Nigel on the spot and decided the time had finally come to move forward with the film.
It was the uncle of Matt Hughes who kindly allowed us to film in his enormous basement (we actually only used one room of his basement, there are three). In the prose story the location is depicted as a bunker that the Wizard patiently dug under his house while his elaborate plan was in motion. For obvious budgetary reasons that idea had to be dropped in favour of a pre-made basement.
The main body of filming took place in that basement in Bootle over five days. Those five days were broken up into three days one week and two days another. Having this divide in the schedule proved invaluable. It allowed us the time to truly assess the footage we had and come up with changes which ultimately strengthened the overall film.
Translating prose to film is not always easy. With prose one has extra elements that can't be called on when trying to tell the same story on film, for instance interior monologues. In the original story there was no need to ever leave the basement, the whole story is set there with other important information taking the form of character thoughts. But in the film I realised quite early on that we needed an epilogue, a chance to show how these events have affected the troll and to add the twist.
In the initial script there is simply an epilogue (very much like epilogues that were often used at the end of an X-Files episode) showing the troll returning to the Internet after a couple of years and writing a blog about his experiences. I literally lifted the interior monologue from the story and placed it as voiceover for a scene of the troll typing.
It was only after we finished filming in the basement that I realised that wouldn't do. The quality of the footage shot in the basement was such that I feared just slapping some silly unthought out epilogue in and thus spoiling the whole film by the end.
I started to think what the reaction of the police might be to this story. This, of course, got me thinking about their attitude and reaction to Internet crime in general. How Internet crime is often not considered a crime worth pursuing the person committing it. If I left the house right now, walked up to a black man and made some aggressive racist slur, that would be considered a 'hate crime'. Particularly if there were witnesses, I wouldn't blame that black man for taking the issue to the police.
But perform what is essentially the same action on the Internet and suddenly that's okay... because it's the Internet. Oh granted the police talk big about the Internet, and are occasionally embarrassed into pursuing certain perpetators or a particular publicised aspect of Internet crime, but with only 95,000 prison places they know that if they were to prosecute everybody who might flaunt the law online they could conceivably fill UK prisons 10 times over (frankly, I'm being conservative with that estimate).
So this led me to the idea that the troll goes to the police to confess. Initially we filmed a scene with one police officer interviewing him, with a scene at the start explaining why she was interviewing him on her own. Later I realised that there was no reason for her to interview him on her own so I made it two police officers, two different police officers at that.
The second officer I made a lot older, someone who probably clearly remembers a time before the Internet and perhaps is not too technically savvy so may well be lost with some of the story, particularly the reference to Youtube comments. This was inspired by my reading the prose story to my mother and her not really getting it, perhaps because of too many modern references.
To this day I'm not even sure how we wound up with the excellent combination of Noel Ross and Kym Veldman. Perhaps they will remember better than I.
In the end we shot the scene in the living room of our sound consultant. It had white walls and a believable enough door but was extremely tight to film in. With just about the whole film shot in telephoto lenses, and just the odd 50mm shot, we didn't have a lot of space to play with. This is a common problem with telephoto lenses in UK dwellings, the rooms just aren't big enough to give you a great range of shot sizes while using a telephoto lens.
Actually, just remembered, the parts of the interview scene that Nigel is in playing the troll were actually filmed separately from the police interviewing him. The fact that I, the director and editor, forgot that shows how effective that deception was. We filmed Nigel's shots for that scene in a room of his home with my cinema screen acting as the white wall behind him (well... a green wall with the lighting of course).
Of course that creates a problem with the sound and we have the fantastic work of our sound editor Martin Gratton to thank for solving that. He succeeded in matching the acoustic qualities of the two different halves of that scene. We are indebted to him for that.
The final edit of this film actually consisted of over a thousand individual video and audio files, I kid you not. There were a good number of composite shots and other effects which one hopes the viewer doesn't notice. In fact I didn't even credit myself for the effects because I didn't want to draw attention to them. If an effect is obvious then it's a failed effect frankly, as most modern effects are I'm afraid. They're so blatant and unashamed about showing off what can be achieved, however that may influence the final digestion of the film by an audience.
The final layer, the icing on the cake, was the music. I hadn't really thought about the music at any stage while making the film, in fact I wasn't even sure that it needed music. In truth the film could have existed quite well without it, there is enough going on dramatically to keep the audience interested.
I listened to a lot of tracks by a lot of different up-and-coming composers before I discovered the work of Lois Paton. She kindly volunteered her services when I asked. I think she was expecting me to send her a temp track, but I hate that practice. When you hand someone a piece of music and say, 'Make it like that,' what you're effectively doing is handing the composer a pair of creative boxing gloves. That is why Hollywood films all tend to sound the same, which makes the music entirely unmemorable.
Because I didn't approach the music with any set ideas this allowed me to effectively say to Lois, 'Knock yourself out.' Given total free reign to compose the music according to her own ideas she came back with the most amazing first music draft you can imagine. Three drafts later, responding to my feedback each time, she delivered a score that fits so well you barely notice it, which is entirely despite the fact that it is not exactly quiet music.
Hollywood tends to hide its music these days, make everything underscore, almost as though they don't want people to notice the music which is fair enough - it is non-diegetic sound after all. But people won't notice the music so much if the story you're showing them is engaging enough, that's the real trick. If you're worried that the music is going to take people out of the experience all I can suggest is that you work a bit longer on the script, because that will only happen with a boring script.
Anyway, I think that's it. I may have forgotten to mention some things but basically that was the production in a nutshell. The film was selected for the Cardiff Mini Film Festival and is entered in a number other larger film festivals that we're going to be waiting what is still a few months before knowing if it will be selected.
As always my thanks and love go out to all who volunteered for this film and helped us bring this story to the screen.
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