With its mix of practical effects, puppetry and dark humor, The Traveler & The Troll feels like it could have stepped straight out of the golden age of ’80s fantasy cinema. The handcrafted short, praised by Nerdist for capturing “all the best elements of the ’80s fantasy movie and bringing them to life, drenched in modernity,” will next screen at the Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival on August 23 as part of the Genre Shorts Block.
The film’s writer-director Adam Murray spoke to OffBeat about the inspirations behind the project, his love of puppetry and the handcrafted approach that’s making festival audiences fall in love with this small but mighty fantasy tale.
What was the inspiration behind the film? It seems to have a very big influence from The Dark Crystal.
There are a lot of influences and motivations that went into the short. The idea just kind of popped into my head one night while talking with my partner, and it felt like a funny enough concept to turn into a short script. But with it being a comedy and a short film, I really wanted to go big on all the other pieces to help elevate the whole concept.
There’s definitely a ton of influence from Jim Henson’s fantasy films and works. Labyrinth is a big one. That played on a steady rotation in our house growing up.
The Dark Crystal [is also an influence] for sure. The Storyteller series from the late ‘80s is a big big influence too. But also films like Ridley Scott’s Legend, Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond, Stardust, Baron Munchausen, The Addams Family, Tommy and Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches make up big parts of the visual inspirations and tone, but I also pulled from Mel Brooks and Elaine May when it came to the comedy of the film.
I tried to grab inspiration from everything I could and find the right spots to drop those pieces into without it feeling overstuffed. There’s a good amount of gags that got cut either in the script process or before we go to set.
Do you always intend to use puppetry in your filmmaking?
This is my first film with a puppet this impressive and large. I’ve always loved puppetry and practical creature FX, and I’ve tried to work those elements into projects over the years like music videos, commercials, and previous shorts. I’ve used smaller puppets and marionettes before, but the troll was a completely new experience for me. I would love to do more films with puppetry as a main element.
It’s such an amazing art form and the performers who bring puppets to life are some of the most talented people I know and have had the honor of working with. Our puppeteers on this film, Brittaney Talbot and Chelsea Pickens, are absolutely phenomenal.
How did you create the look of the troll?
I used to work as an animator and character designer, so I sketched a few different ideas for the head of the Troll and landed on his overall look pretty quickly. He’s partially inspired by our dog Rudy. The floppy ears, the blind right eye, the kind of ‘put upon’ attitude.
There were some ideas in the original concept that we couldn’t put into practice due to budget, but he turned out amazing, mainly due to Chelsea Pickens, who was one of our puppeteers, and she also built and sculpted the puppet’s head, his animatronics, and his body. I also want to say thank you to Tim Phoenix and Chad Washam who helped in the casting and foam process of the Troll’s head.
He was built in a way where he could be operated by one or two people depending on what the shot called for. Brittaney Talbot was our main puppeteer, and she was wearing a hiking backpack that Chelsea outfitted with support rods to help hold the weight of the Troll’s head, which ended up being around ten pounds. None of this film happens without Chelsea Pickens. She’s incredible.
How do you approach casting in a puppet centric film?
The casting for this was pretty easy. I wanted the Troll to have a deep and serious tone to his voice. Ralph Ineson’s voice was kind of the blueprint, and I knew my friend Dave Child was capable of doing a “monster voice”. I’ve worked with Dave on a couple of projects over the years, and he’s always so good and funny. He’s one of my best friends and we have very similar tastes when it comes to film and comedy, so I knew he would crush the role.
I’ve known Erika for years. We both operate in the nerd comedy media sphere online and they were my immediate go to, not just because they’re wildly talented and funny, but Erika lives and breathes fantasy and fantasy storytelling, so I knew this was something they could sink their teeth into, and I’m so lucky to have gotten both of my first choices in this film.
What is the dynamic in rehearsals like?
We were on a tight budget and schedule, which is kind of the case with any indie project. We only had one rehearsal before shooting, which also acted as our wardrobe fitting and in the field puppet test. The rehearsal was great and we used a good chunk of it to help Erika and our puppet team get used to working with each other and get the movements of the Troll down when he was being operated by both of our puppeteers.
Something I learned on this shoot, at least for our puppeteers, is they prefer to have the dialogue pre-recorded to rehearse to, which we had on set as well, but I also had Dave on set to lend his voice during takes if we came up with a new delivery or line that we would find while filming. It was kind of a mashup of a bunch of different approaches that we came up with as a team.
The world of the film feels very tactile and lived-in. How did you design the sets?
I kind of went into the set building process a little bit blind. I’ve worked as art department in the past, but never built something like this. Thankfully, our neighbors are also fabricators and FX artists, shout out to Cleve and Tiana Gunderman, and they really helped give me a road map to how to make our set look as great as it does.
I really love the look of films that were shot at Pinewood Studios back in the ‘80s. I love the depth and scale of the sets in Legend and Krull. The spills of light and the swirling mists they could create have always stuck with me. I think that type of craftsmanship is just so beautiful.
I carved the trees out of large blocks of styrofoam (eight feet high by four feet wide) and they were painted with a palette of different house paints. We didn’t have a confirmed shooting location until about a month before our main shooting dates, so we didn’t have a space to assemble the set until we got to Laurel Canyon Stages, where we shot the majority of the film.
Since we were on a tight budget, I wanted to make the trees easily moveable so we could shift them into the backgrounds of different shots to help add depth when we needed it. We also had five tree silhouettes, just flat black outlines, which we used to add to that depth. Our lighting and camera crew (Sarah, Isue, Hye Young, and Isaac) did such a fantastic job crafting the look of this.
I knew I wanted a base of a big tree to put behind Erika to help express the scale of our fake forest. My buddy Ben Trandem is a great director and super talented prop and monster designer, who knocked what we called “The Big Tree” out of the park. He also built the log with the trapped soul inside of it.
What do you hope audiences will take away from this project?
Mainly I hope people have a good time with it. Things are really rough right now for a lot of people, and I want to give audiences a good laugh. I also hope people want to see more and more films that embrace practical FX. We’re constantly getting generative ai slop thrown at us from so many angles. It’s so hollow and ugly and unethical, it’s mind-boggling at times how horrid it is.
A big motivation for this was to make a film with friends, who are super talented artists, who make things by hand with their own imaginations, and create something with heart and feeling that audiences could latch on to, whether it’s the puppet, the Traveler, the world itself, or all of it.
Based on the reactions we’ve gotten from festival audiences, I think we’ve accomplished that, and I’m so proud of this film and the amazing humans who made it come to life.
Purchase passes to see The Traveller & The Troll at BRUFF
