by Kevin Dole
The following interview took place via emial between Kevin Dole and Edward Martin III, the director of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Kevin Dole: What made you pick this project?
Edward Martin III: You have to understand that I didn't pick this end result. It just happened this way! I had just finished The Testament of Tom Jacoby and was really looking forward to trying something else weird and quirky. One of my first experiments was to do a little bit of clay animation. I had recently seen a clay animated movie at the Lovecraft Film Festival (The Old Man and the Goblins, I think) and I was inspired by the mechanical aptitude necessary to do that.
Of the Lovecraft work I've read, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has been a favorite since forever. I like that it's a real adventure and I like that it's a fantasy and I like that it has no hobbits or dwarves or goblins or dragons or wizards. I planned to do a little short piece using clay animation, just Carter's adventure in the bottom of the Vale of Pnath, which I believed could be told with only music and sound effects. A friend joked with me about doing the whole story, but doing it with animated stick figures. This reminded me of Jason Thompson's comic book series. I contacted Jason, fully expecting him to say "No way, dude!" but instead, he was really supportive of the project. I approached my Producer with the idea, explaining what I wanted to do and, after she read the story, she agreed to fund it.
It was originally going to be a single narrator, and very simple animation, just stills, basically. But in no time at all, the script grew in complexity and we were recording voices from dozens of different people. Then, as I would animate different sub-chunks of the movie, the animation became more complex as I learned more tricks. Early on, the project was designed to be broken up into chunks and done a little bit at a time, which lent the whole thing just fabulously to distributing across helpers. At first, I had none, then one or two, then four or five, then a dozen, then twenty, then... And these people were of all sorts of different talents, too! Some were just barely starting with Photoshop, others were long-time animators. Some started out with simple tasks and gradually progressed to more complicated sequences. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath became in many ways a learning laboratory for anyone who was willing to fling a few pixels around. That was way cool!
As we progressed with the movie, we realized it was going to result in a far more complex project than we anticipated, so we jumped the schedule by one year. Fact is, a feature-length animated movie in a one-year schedule was pretty nutty anyway! Two years allowed us a lot more time to do more animation, plus it gave our composer more time, plus it assured us that we would be able to premiere at the Lovecraft Film Festival. The latter point was important to me, as I wanted to make good with Andrew Migliore, the chairman of the HPLFF and owner of Beyond Books. I volunteer every year for him and he's been really supportive of my projects (even the ones he thankfully DIDN'T show at the Festival!).
In one stroke, we committed to a deadline, committed to a more complex movie, and had a (potential!) premiere venue.
After two years, we have this wacky animated adventure that I'm really pleased with (and everybody who worked on it should be, too!) and it bears only the slightest resemblance to what we wanted to do when we started! We didn't pick this project. We picked something slightly different, but this is what we got. And no one's more happy about that than us!
KD: This isn't your first Lovecraft film project. You've also released a short joke version of The Call of Cthulhu and your original Testament of Tom Jacoby was an honorable mention in the Salem Amateur Horror Film Festival.
EM3: Well, The Testament of Tom Jacoby is my own creation, although there is a mild resemblance to Lovecraft's story "The Beast in the Cave". Likewise our next movie, a short called Innsmouth Legacy, borrows only peripherally from "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as source material. Innsmouth Legacy could actually have the sole reference to Innsmouth (which only appears in the title) dropped and the story would play just as creepy.
The Testament of Tom Jacoby also won the award for "Bad and Wrong! Bad and Wrong!" from the Gore-O-Rama-A-Go-Go film festival in 2002. Joe Bob Briggs referred to it as "Ken Burns does horror". Woo-hoo!
KD: What attracts you to his material again and again?
EM3: My earliest memories/nightmares were of horrible shapeless things in our basement and passages that led below our basement to dank darkness below, filled with breathing, chittering things. I've always known that the world as we know it is only the world we can see, that there exists beneath/behind/within it a different world, a different type of existence. Even now, I know that there is a facet of existence that is not governed by the electromagnetic spectrum, that there is a realm of existence where such "obvious" things as cause and effect have little or no meaning. Metaphorically, what we experience as "reality" is like the protrusion of a three-dimensional object into our two-dimensional world. We only see a fraction of what is "real".
This is as it should be! I think the luckiest of people have epiphanies where they briefly experience greater perception and see that which lies behind the veil of perception, but the fate reserved for those with prolonged or profounder vision of such things is simply a giddy sort of madness -- the beauty of existence is probably too great for most minds to handle without snapping.
When reading Lovecraft's work, I was immediately drawn in because of this way of thinking. It wasn't that I adopted what he wrote as some interesting mythos in which there existed all manners of beasts, but that he wrote what I already knew to be true.
KD: How come Dream-Quest isn't available through Beyond Books?
EM3: It's kind of complicated, but I guess the simplest answer is that currently, we move more units than Beyond Books would (at least for a while), and the margins are much better for us. We spent the money to produce the feature originally, plus we're producing the DVD, so we have more costs to recoup. Profits from one project feed the next one, so unless we can hit the ground running with a distributor, then it's more cost-effective for us to sell our own product.
Certainly we're open to distributing through different channels, but right now, it's most advantageous to distribute ourselves.
KD: It's interesting that you should mention beauty being what is hidden behind the 'veil of existence', because that's not what most people think of when talking about Lovecraft. Do you find youself more attracted to the Dream stories over the conventional Mythos?
EM3: I do, but it's also probably a big difference in how I use "beauty" versus how most of the rest of the world uses it. Heh.
To me, there is unbearable beauty in the vast frozen city of the Old Ones deep in the Antarctic mountain ranges. There is a vicious beauty in the capering horrors of hundreds of hungry cannibals scampering out of tunnels and across a stormswept night meadow, illuminated by strobes of lightning. There is an intimate beauty in Randolph Carter's journeys back into his own past. I guess I'm using "beauty" to -- in part -- describe the unseeable. I base this on the mystic's use of "beauty" in the generic experience of the epiphany, or the expression of beauty in the achievement of enlightenment.
In short, where others see terror and horror and doom, I see a different kind of beauty. A violent beauty. A hungry beauty. An indifferent beauty. A clearly otherworldly beauty.
I'm mostly drawn to the work of Lovecraft that touches on this otherworldy existence. The Dream Cycle does this, but so does most of his other work.
KD: How did you discover Lovecraft?
EM3: I honestly cannot recall a time when I was not at least peripherally aware of his work, but a lot of this might be because my own leanings toward the nature of the Universe predate my exposure to Lovecraft and thus my introduction to his work was an affirmation (as if I needed one!) of my own long-held thoughts. The two blend together. I think it is true that I had read no Lovecraft before the age of seven, but that by the age of twelve, I had at least read a story or two.
A massive influx of Lovecraft happened once I started volunteering for the Lovecraft Film Festival. That was a more-or-less pure stream.
KD: Why did you volunteer at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival if you weren't that big a fan of his work?
EM3: Well, there's a slight flaw in the premises of the question. It wasn't that I wasn't that big a fan of his work at all -- I just wasn't as familiar with Lovecraft's work as I was before I met Andrew Migliore. I'd read a few stories and I knew that his work was the basis of Re-Animator and From Beyond and by then, I had read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Beyond the Gates of the Silver Key, so, as far as the rest of humanity was concerned, I was already a Lovecraft nut!
I happened across the Lovecraft Film Festival marquee on my way to a screenwriting class and thought something like "Well, how about that -- I didn't even know there WAS such a thing! I'm gonna have to check that out this weekend" and I had a really great time watching the movies (my favorite was a short film called Halfway Home which knocked my socks off). I mean, I hadn't seen such a collection of short movies all in one clump before EVER.
The next year, I dropped the chairman a letter for one reason or another and we started talking. I fancied myself somewhat of an aggressive marketer and he mentioned how tough a time he was doing marketing the festival. So I stepped up to the plate and started hammering every media outlet I could think of. It was fun! Every year since, I've volunteered something for Andrew. Sometimes it was building press kits, sometimes mailing solicitations, writing letters, greeting people and handing out questionnaires. One year, I made up goodie bags and personalized badges for all the visiting filmmakers. It was a really great way to meet all these people!
KD: How did your work at the festival influence you as a Lovecraft filmmaker?
EM3: The closest thing to an influence was destigmatizing the "industry" of making movies. It is such a strange and bizarre Oz, but all these guys were ordinary guys, who just happened to make movies. It was that simple. Suddenly, I realized that there wasn't some ephemeral yet impenetrable difference between myself and those-who-make-movies. All I needed was to grab a damn camera and start shooting. Well, there were a FEW things I had to consider. But still...
This whole thought process was fired in a completely different crucible, however. Every year, I volunteer with a bunch of other filmmakers at a science fiction convention in Seattle. We do a whole series of workshops on how to make a movie. The goal is to show people that if they want to make a movie, if they want to script and shoot and edit their own opus on video, they CAN. Every year, we make a new movie with a new crew (sometimes, people come back). Once I saw a short at the Lovecraft Film Festival and I really liked it. Turned out the fella who made it took the Norwescon workshop several years earlier. Now THAT was some serious jazz! Wow -- people making movies after taking that workshop. Cool!
At every year's Festival, I meet a lot of people who have their first films in the Festival and we all had a jammin' good time. Some of us are even planning on working together on upcoming projects. How cool is that?!
KD: At what point to Cyo become involved? How did this happen?
EM3: I've known Cyoakha and been a huge fan of her music for many years, since she owned an art gallery here in Portland ("Galleri 8"). At the first note I heard her play, I instantly fell in love with her music. I attended every concert of hers I could in Portland, and as many as I could outside, including her annual appearance at the Witches Ball in Eugene, Oregon. We struck up a correspondence and have been really neat friends ever since.
At the time I was considering composers for The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, I did consider her, but I figured that she wouldn't be too interested, as it was a pretty pie-in-the-sky thing and she was this award-winning composer who did amazing things down in San Francisco. I briefly chatted with a composer friend in Tacoma, who was conferring with Cyoakha on a few things. As it turns out, once Cyoakha found out I hadn't talked to her first, she called me a crazy coot (I'm a coot?!) and to start talking with her. It was a bit of an awkward place, because I had talked first with this other composer (Judy Grover), and now I was in the position of an embarrassment of riches. So, I talked with Judy and she very courteously allowed me to pursue Cyoakha's involvement with the soundtrack. Judy's always been supportive of my movies, and continued being a very positive force in Dream-Quest even when she wasn't contributing score work.
Cyoakha offered me even more than I expected. Rather than simply scoring the soundtrack, she wanted to supervise the whole music and foley mix. It made for a very interesting bit of hat-switching at times, because when I was directing, I was kinda' king of the mountain, but when it came to the sounds and the music, I deferred to her. If she said a bit of foley was obnoxious, I took it out (although actually, she seemed to like most of the foley). At one point, she and I spent literally three days sitting in front of an editing computer in headphones, going over every single sound in the movie. It was amazing!
KD: Could you describe how you got so many people to volunteer on this project?
EM3: Well, we're all volunteers, basically, so it's more of a question of how did I get so many people to join in and play too! I wrote to every mailing list I was on, dropped regular updates to my own mailing list, and always, always, always begged people to help. I also designed The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath from the beginning to be easily divvied up. It lent itself well to distributed animation because it was DESIGNED for that, with hundreds of little tiny animated sections.
Philosophically, I told people that we were working on this fun project and that if they wanted to jump in and help, I'd be happy to find a place for 'em. I also promised people screen credit and a copy of the movie when it was done, but my inner optimist believes the real reason so many people joined in was because it was fun.
KD: What kind of people were they?
EM3: I didn't check for gills, if that's what you mean (although we had one Tillinghast on staff, which was cool). They were, I believe, people who really wanted to help with this nutty project somehow. Some were friends, some were animators, or soon-to-be animators, others were huge fans of the book, and some were Photoshop wizzes and just wanted to diddle a few pictures for me.
KD: Primarily Lovecraft fans?
EM3: Oh certainly there were quite a few of those, but there were many people who helped who didn't know Lovecraft from Adam. They just did it because they thought it was fun and the work was relatively simple. I might be wrong -- I didn't actually ASK people why they were playing -- I was just so grateful that they joined in that I didn't CARE. We were all making a movie together. That was the important thing to me.
KD: What other figures in the Lovecraft film community were involved in the project?
EM3: Craig Mullins of www.unfilmable.com did a lot of animation help for me and regularly published my newsletters on his website. That was really helpful! The first person to acknowledge that I was actually doing this was Christian Matzke (of Nyarlathotep and An Imperfect Solution), who mentioned it on his website. Toren Atkinson, our voice for Randolph Carter, is pretty heavily involved in the musical end of the spectrum, with his participation in "The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets". Of course, Andrew Migliore offered tremendous amounts of support, especially as we neared the end. I think I actually rose a whole inch off the ground when he told me "Yeah, that was pretty neat" the first time he saw anything about it. Bryan Moore (of Cool Air) was very supportive, too, as were most of the Lovecraft filmmaking crowd.
KD: What kind of equipment (PC and software) did you use to make The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath?
EM3: From soup-to-nuts...
We used Microsoft Word to write the script. I am very familiar with Word and use it for writing all my scripts.
We recorded voices using a Sony minidisc recorder, an MRZ37, I think. Although it's not as fancy-numbered as the later versions of Sony's minidisc recorders, the '37 is a fabulous machine and we're really very happy with it.
I filtered and edited all voice recordings using a software product called Goldwave, which is extremely handy and very reasonably priced. Goldwave allowed me to grab a patch of "quiet" (ambient noise) and build a filter to filter out THAT. I also used Goldwave on all the foley and all the music, although there really wasn't MUCH editing for Cyoakha's music -- mostly the occasional blip at the beginning of ending of a track.
Most of our work was performed on a Compaq Presario 7994, which is a 900 MHz machine. You would think it would be to slow, but seeing as how most of this was graphics work, that only resulted in longer waits. Our Production machine came along in the last couple months of production and is a P4 of some sort. Very nice. Hyperthreading. I'm a happy monkey.
The movie as a whole was built using Adobe Premiere. For some of the smaller animated sequences, we used Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and whatever other tool seemed handy. For image editing, we used Adobe Photoshop. For sound editing, we used Goldwave, which I mentioned earlier. For the star and space scenes, we used a couple of really neat software tools. One was Universe Creator, from Diard Software, and another was a collection of Photoshop plug-ins from Flaming Pear.
I originally mastered the DVD using DVDLab, which is a very ingenious DVD creation tool, but had to switch to having someone else master it because of a technical requirement (DVDLab can't do multiple audio tracks yet and we have an alternate audio track).
KD: Was there any uniformity among the equipment that the volunteers were using?
EM3: Beats me. I made it a point to specify how I wanted the files to arrive (PCT format), but didn't really care how they worked on the files. There were lots of people using Photoshop, of course, some using Gimp, others using all kinds of tools. At least one fellow animated his sequences in Flash and then exported a series of bitmaps. A couple other people discovered that we had the same versions of After Effects and Premiere, so would do their entire animation sequence themselves and just send me the AE or Premiere files.
There were a couple of times people would write and say "Gee, I'd love to help, but I don't have Photoshop", and I'd find some way for them to help anyway. The whole goal here was to give people as much of an opportunity to play with us as they wanted.
KD: As someone very familiar with Lovecraft film, what challenges do you think his work presents to adaptation? (I'm thinking here of those you have faced as a filmmakers, those you would imagine from reading his stories, and those you're noticed in the works of others screened at the HPLFF)
EM3: First of all, there are lots of people who are waaaaay more familiar with Lovecraftian cinema than I. Andrew Migliore, of course, immediately comes to mind.
Second, one of the neatest things about the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival is that it's a complete testbed of filmmakers. All ranges of skills and storytelling, all ranges of ages and desire. It's just a marvelous mix. Because of this, it's pretty much impossible to categorize these works in any meaningful way.
Now I've safely covered my ass.
Lovecraft is essentially a psychological fantasy (well, as I interpret his work, anyway), so the real challenge to any filmmaker who wants to portray that is to carry the psychological fantasy element right along. Sometimes, we read a story and see this kind of monster or that kind of creature, or some whiz-bang piece of technology and we think that's what our story's about. But the really neat stories, and here I'm speaking of movies, are the ones that essentially engage the same kind of flood of emotional response in us that we received from the prose version.
Now, what's peculiar about this is that the trigger for a movie doesn't necessarily have to be the same trigger as would be in a book. This is not an uncommon mistake. If I want to adapt The Shadow Over Innsmouth, say, I would focus on the intense personal terror of knowing that I was going to become something... else. Sure, I could show gills and flippers and bubbly eyes, but it's not necessarily the same thing. In my mind, the terror in the story The Shadow Over Innsmouth would not produce the same terror in a movie. And at the same time, the visual and auditory triggers that WOULD produce that response in a movie would probably fall flat in a story.
Books are not movies and movies are not books. The greatest challenge any filmmaker has (and I know because I fail regularly!) is to remember that exact thing. Books are not movies and movies are not books.
Now, the downside to this is that with Lovecraft, you've got some real intensity in the readership and if you screw up some detail, you get paddled for not being true to the story. On the other hand, if you just extract something, say, the intimate madness and paranoia of a Lovecraft story and drape it in a purely and uniquely cinematic skin, you get something like The Blair Witch Project, which, I think, is arguably one of the best non-Lovecraft Lovecraftian movies out there. But it doesn't have fish-people. So, go figure.
KD: On that note, how has been the reaction from the Lovecraft (and Lovecraft film) community?
EM3: Well, that's a tricky thing. I think most people are seeing it for what it is -- a group of amateurs doing the best they can with a ridiculously huge task. Most that I've talked with, however, can see how the project was this massive learning laboratory and they can see as the movie progresses, how our animation gets better and better.
I don't think anyone really expected Final Fantasy, y'know?
The movie's great and I love it. The next movie'll be even better!
KD: I for one was surprised by the level of detail included from the book. You guys included stuff that I figured you would have to leave out because of the difficulty of conveying it on screen.
EM3: Heh, depending on who you ask, we probably SHOULD have! Really, the credit for all this inclusion must go to Jason Thompson and his amazing comic book. For the most part, if it's in the movie, then it's there because he drew it. A lot of the text he and I lifted directly from Lovecraft's story, although for most of the dialogue, I had to fiddle with things a bit to make it sound a little more natural.
As far as the climax, where Carter rebuilds a new Universe that allows him to wake up back in Boston, well, how the heck do you portray THAT?! I think I did okay on that sequence, though, and Cyoakha's music really helped it the rest of the way home.
I worried at first about putting too MUCH of the books in there, but then I figured that I was basically making this movie to please myself and other people like me and as such, I'll put everything I wanted to in there. Obviously, there's a difference in style we took with Dream-Quest from our normally v-e-r-y sparse approach in our own scripts. But I wanted it all in there, so it all went in there. We shoehorned the bejeebers out of it. Frankly, when I think about the whole thing, I think 100 minutes was a little on the SHORT side, but it happened as it happened.
KD: What kind of marks are you getting for adaptation and faithfulness? Any complaints?
EM3: Most people seem to be of the opinion that we've been pretty faithful (or slavish, depending on whom you ask) to the original text. For some, this is good. For others, this was not-so-good.
The complaints are always interesting. We expected to catch static for our voice choice for Nyarlathotep and we have. We didn't expect to catch flak for the cat voices, yet we did as well. We've received complaints about a variety of aspects of the movie and the production, but they were all faults/qualities of which we were already aware, so there wasn't a whole lot of sting in hearing them (okay, I was surprised when I learned some folks didn't like female voices being used for the cats -- I still think that's a weird criticism, but oh well). Even when people laughed at the goofy animation, I knew that yep, it WAS goofy animation.
I'm really pleased with the results and I'm really proud of this crew, all of whom busted hump to do the best job they could. The thing's never been adapted to screen before, and most of us had never done ANYTHING like this before and we just grabbed that elephant and started eating one bite at a time. And it's great. I love it. I still watch it on occasion (every time I visit a friend or family member who hasn't seen it yet, I watch it again) and I still end up telling myself "Hey, we did that. Cool!"
