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Damon Dark Sourcebook

"Stand By For Mars!"

Damon Dark Sourcebook

Damon Dark: The Adrian Sherlock Interview Ever wanted to make your own science fiction movies, but daunted by the thought? Then you'll find the story of Adrian Sherlock inspiring. He's made 11 mini-movies featuring his own creation, the X-Files and UFO inspired Damon Dark, and you can see them all for free at Youtube.   Web thethunderchild.com Adrian graciously gave us permission to place some of those videos on this site, as well as submit to several questions. Adrian has a comprehensive website at http://straker11.tripod.com/index.html. Questions below are in bold, and Adrian's responses are in plain text. The sentences in quotations are quotes from Adrian's website, and were used as starting points for certain questions. Please be patient while all video segments load. Describe your birth and childhood. Well, I was born in Geelong, Victoria, (Australia) on Christmas Day, 1966. Geelong is a seaport town, about an hour by car from Melbourne. My Dad studied for the textiles industry but ended up working for the Ford Motor Company which was and is based in Geelong. My Mother was pretty much a housewife and mother. I'm the oldest of five children, a brother and three sisters. When I was eleven, the first of my two youngest sisters came along, and my Mother suffered a terrible and long-term illness. Before 1977 and the mass popularity of Star Wars, no one accepted Science Fiction as popular entertainment, but I found it a huge escape from the problems of my home and the working class surrounds of Geelong. I don't think SF is purely escapism, I found it rewarding in many ways, and the fact that I was seen as an oddball at school only drove me to engross myself in it more and more. I began writing short stories about space opera adventures in spare time at school, was fascinated by physics and space science, and even dreamt of being an Astronaut from a very young age. Adrian Sherlock describes the influences on Damon Dark. I was followed around the school yard by groups of taunting kids making Space Invaders sound effects at me. Generally, I was persecuted for my love of SF in a way that is hard to imagine today, and yet that persecution only made me cherish and defend it even more. My younger brother certainly influenced or encouraged me, because when I was 16, I convinced my parents to buy me a Super 8 mm film camera and I began to make a series of space opera films in which I cast my little brother as a teenage action hero of outer space, who came and went from contemporary Geelong in a space ship and had such things as teleport bracelet and blaster with which to fight an array of rubbery green aliens. These were shot in sequence and edited in camera, a tricky thing to do. I had surprisingly few total disasters and learned a lot of no budget ways to achieve visual effects. Damon Dark Timeslip Part 1 You've already stated what British TV shows were your inspiration. Well I first wanted to be an astronaut and read about real space exploration. It struck me as a very clever idea that you could imagine what might happen and write a story about it. My first taste of science fiction was Lost in Space. Then Space:1999 came on and was tremendously exciting with incredible visual effects. I begged my parents to watch the premiere of Space:1999 and saw the teaser and then my Mother noticed the Adults Only rating and became concerned and sent me to bed. But I collected the swap cards like a boy possessed and still have most of them to this day. UFO came on as reruns and used to frighten me with its eerie aliens who would float up from under the water, gets white shells removed from their eyes and die on the operating table. Creepy show! I then discovered Doctor Who beginning with Tom Baker's first season episode "The Sontaran Experiment". I couldn't get over the realism of the creatures, compared to the rest of TV aliens at the time. I became a huge Who fan and stayed one. When Doctor Who ran into trouble with the Colin Baker era in the mid 80s, I was thrilled to catch a rerun of UFO. It was a long time since I'd seen it and it stood up well. I was amazed by the depth of characterisation they lavished on the character of Commander Ed Straker. The episode "Confetti Check: A.OK" was enough to move me to tears, detailing how Straker's choice to dedicate his life to defending the Earth caused his marriage to break up. I was further amazed by "A Question of Priorities", in which he sacrificed his injured son's life and "Sub Smash" where we learn he suffers from claustrophobia. Damon Dark Timeslip Part 2 It was amazing to see an SF hero get so much character development and to realise that a hero could have weaknesses which were psychological and emotional. I wanted to draw this aspect into my own writing, but I was also impressed very much by the dark, spooky, surrealistic stuff and the idea that SF could delve into the world of film noir. "Timelash", about time standing still, "The Long Sleep", about aliens bringing the dead back to life, "Mindbender" in which the aliens cause surreal hallucinations and "Reflections in the Water" in which the hero meets an alien copy of himself and his friends, all resonated deeply with me. I could see these stories as multi-layered, like Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, where the stories worked as both tales of battles with aliens, but also as representative or emblematic tales of human psychology, reflecting our fears and obsessions and inner demons. Damon Dark Maddox Part 1 "Dark started out as an Australian secret agent with an obsession for tracking down UFOs and combatting the aliens he suspects are out to conquer our world." How long did it take you to write the script for the first series of Damon Dark? Did you do an outline for it? I wrote a number of different outlines, in fact I used to draft outlines up to a dozen times over, in search of the perfect outline. I was very, very keen to have a really clearly worked out plot before I ever attempted to write anything. It had to hang together clearly in my head before I started. I'd already written a full length movie script in 1990 and a few others including "Maddox" and "Dark Reflection" before I ever made anything. Maddox became a part of the Channel 31 series, the pilot Timeslip I wrote in one sitting and took about an hour to write (I was focused that day!). The unproduced script I wrote for Ed Bishop, "Shadowfall", was written in 1996 and went through a few drafts with input from Ed's letters. That script has now been done as an audio play. How did you acquire all the actors that you used in your shows. I wrote the first ones with only me in mind as Damon. The first person I wrote for was Ed Bishop after I'd suggested the project to him. When I wrote the first one we made, "Timeslip", I'd met the girl Susan and I told her my idea and then I wrote her role specifically for her. I asked my Agent to fix me up with an actor who could play a menacing killer and went to visit him and gave him the script I'd written. With the subsequent stories, I wrote them first, then went looking for actors. Damon Dark Maddox Part 2 On "Maddox", friends fixed me up with actors they knew and I auditioned a lot of girls for Vercuca in the "Maddox" serial. Niobe Dean was absolutely perfect and I offered her the role on the spot when she came and read for me. She went on to be in Star Wars: Broken Allegiance, and has become something of a cult figure. I'm not surprised at all, she was talented, professional and very photogenic, very pretty and cool. Most recently, I asked my friend Robert Trott to play a baddie for me as he has a great look and is very talented. I picked Viv Perry from a short film I'd seen her in, a fan adaptation of Robert Sheckley's 7th Victim. I offered her a role without even meeting her, I was so confident that she would be great. She was a scene-stealing actor and looked great, again a very cool, very attractive and photogenic lady with a lot of ability. I've always come from an actor's point of view and I take casting quite seriously, along with costume, because I believe the characters are what we watch for and I value actors very highly in a film. Damon Dark Maddox Part 3 "In 1985, I finally got to see a series which had haunted my imagination since early childhood, Gerry Anderson's UFO. But they failed to screen the episode which stuck in my brain, the eerie TIMELASH!" Does this mean you never saw the show until 1985 - just read about? I remembered the biggest plot points and a few key images and that was it. I was reunited with this episode in 1992 when I met a fellow UFO fan who invited me around and showed me a copy he'd borrowed. To my utter amazement, the copy he showed me had been taped off air the very night I saw it screen in 1978, with one of the very first VCRs. The episode didn't air in Australia again until 1995. I am happy to tell you, it was even better than I remembered and I watched it many times over that day. Brilliant. "The idea was developed on scraps of paper for a while and eventually became a failed attempt in 1992 to make a feature on 16 MM. My lack of experience caught me out and I overexposed the film. My long suffering cameraman was alienated by this experience. Not my finest hour!" How much had you filmed before you overexposed the film. A bit more detail on how you overexposed it? Isn't that the cameraman's job? Hmm. I wanted to make a film like The Omega Man/Last Man on Earth, so we followed the approach of Robert Rodreguiz and shot in sequence. Damon Dark: Mother I had 33 minutes of 16mm film and shot this stuff early mornings on the weekend when everything was deserted and Damon is like the lone human wandering through this deserted suburban area and he gets stalked by this dead body which comes to life as a zombie and Damon ends up killing him. In the later half, he was supposed to meet up with the menace who was behind it all.we shot 22 minutes, up to Damon killing the zombie after a fight scene in a playground. I shot it silent with the idea that we'd hear Damon's thought voice on the sound track later, a voice over. This was an economical solution.I had it all planned, but neither the camera man, a film maker I had met, or I understood the risks of over exposing the film. The lab report came back with everything right but the exposure levels. It was good material, but washed out and I had no money to reshoot. Devastating. And the camera man and I fell out over it, which I accept the responsibility for. I lacked people skills in those days, to be blunt about it. But you learn from painful experiences. Shadowfall Prelude "Damon Dark finally got a shaky but watchable debut in an 8 minute silent film shot on Super 8, with my friend Wayne Monk as a Terminator-like robot. Hardly auspicious, but a step forward!" So you were the cameraman for this also? How many different cameras have you had - and did you do any filming as a kid? Or did you buy the cameras strictly to film your Damon Dark material? This was done with the Super 8 camera I got at age 16. The 16 mm gear was hired at great expense from a professional outfit that hired to the industry and I had to teach myself how to load the film using the dark bag and got it right I'm proud to say. The early Damon Dark video stuff was shot with a hired camera and camera man. "Maddox" was shot with a borrowed Hi 8 camera. I own my own digital video camera now and that's been used for all the stuff this decade! Ed Bishop [Commander Straker, UFO] had agreed to star in one of your films, but the project fell through. Can you expand on this? Ed was very generous and obviously dedicated to his fans, he didn't want money, he was ready to give something back to his fans as long as I got him to Australia for the shoot. There's the obvious advantage that cross-linking your creation to someone who is well known generates a certain amount of interest, but if I thought I was simply exploiting him, I'd drop the whole thing. Shadowfall: Damon Dark Meets Straker? [AUDIO ONLY] In the end, the money to get him here fell through and while I tried to come up with alternatives, I think Ed was concerned that he didn't want his fans to be cheated in any way. I totally appreciate that point of view. He took a dim view of celebrities cashing in on their fame in certain respects, I think, he didn't believe in taking from the people who enjoyed his work. I respect that and again, I have to support that. He was a generous and genuine human being and I was very deeply saddened when I heard he'd passed away. The encouragement he gave to me was priceless and he did that despite how disappointed he must have been when our project fell through. Shadowfall Part 2: AUDIO PLAY "Next chapter of Damon Dark was when I met a wonderful, talented and good-hearted lady named Susan Anderson on the set of the film AMY..." Describe your acting experience prior to this. I was just an extra on Amy. I kicked off my acting career in 1986 writing and acting in a rock musical based around Beatles music called This is Now, which was produced as a community project involving a local High School in Geelong. My character was a comical take on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. This gave me the acting bug and I studied drama for two years in Melbourne at a small privately run drama school. I got an agent and was soon doing extras work and bit parts in all kinds of movies and TV shows. I brushed shoulders with Max Von Sydow, Tom Selleck, and Peter Graves. I met Graves when I worked twice on the revived Misson: Imposssible. It's fascinating to me that I met Peter Graves and asked after his former co-stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, because they starred in Space:1999, the show which replaced UFO. Sometimes it seems your childhood heroes are so close you can touch them, and that's a phenomena that I've always found exciting and humbling at the same time. Outside of acting, I've met two Doctor Who stars (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) and one of my school teachers went to school with the man who is now married to Katy Manning from Doctor Who and I ended up meeting Katy and telling her that. "The quality of the episode "Timejump" (Working title: "Timeslip") was quite high, in terms of production, featuring some spooky lighting and brilliant, wonderful horror make up!" Who were your lighting and makeup people? What locations did you use? My accountant, Stan Canny, let me shoot at his office. He and his people were very supportive of my attempts to produce a serious feature film of Damon Dark in 1996. Shadowfall part 3 I also used the State Government Offices building in Geelong, which resembles and inverted pyramid, as Damon Dark's secret Headquarters. The camera man achieved the lighting with a single light by lighting it from the side and the make up was by a couple of brilliant girls from Geelong's Faceworx Salon. They were make up teachers and knew it all but this was a rare chance for them to work on a film and they did great. Very professional. Editing was the biggest let down and this was a problem I encountered continuously, there was no digital computer editing around in those days (1997!) unless you had big bucks to throw around. Now I can recut the film for nothing on my home PC and polish it to perfection. Shadowfall part 4 "The giant Rob Philips, a fantastic guy!" and realise they've time slipped into the future by just half a day! Would you care to share more info on Rob Philips. Do you have 'bloopers' or funny/interesting stories to share about each of your filming projects?" Rob was recommended by my Agent and I ended up visiting him at his home (you really get out of your comfort zone when you make films) and he was a really nice friendly guy, but his huge stature made him look totally scary with a bit of make up and lighting. He popped down, did his part in one day and left. I was very grateful, as I am to all my actors. They are all wonderful people and they do great work and deserve way more recognition than they usually get. Bloopers were few and far between, oddly enough. I'm pretty organised as a rule. But when Susan and I walked through the office door to find our future corpses, she stood on my foot with very sharp heels, so you see Damon Dark say "My God, Candy, look! You've stood on my foot!" That made everyone laugh but me! The guy who played Maddox (Andrew Dunn) was funny. I gave him open-ended phone calls, like, "Hello, this is Maddox speaking." He had these two guys playing staring, blank faced zombies and Andrew would suddenly say into his phone, "You know those Mammoth Meat Sales? Where do they get that Mammoth meat? Mammoths are extinct!" And you see these two staring zombies crack up laughing. On "Damon Dark and the Bomb", I spend most of the film handcuffed to a drain pipe with an alien bomb nearby. My favourite outtake was when we went "action" and the cuffs just came undone and my hand came out. I held them up in amazement and everyone laughed. Dark Reflection Part 1 One of the most enjoyable days was when Karl Siemon (Director on "Maddox") and Niobe Dean and I just drove around Melbourne all day with a video camera and shot scene after scene in all these different locations. That was magic, we were in the zone. I think the three of us did great work that day and it was the type of indie film making I'd love to do a lot more of. The last day shooting Maddox he's on a beach, the UFO's meant to be in the sea and Maddox has super powers and he's got arms in the air and shouting "I am Simon Maddox, I am a God!" It was an incredibly hot sunny day, the beach was crowded with sun bathers and there was even a plane filling the air with sky writing and as Andrew shouting "I am a God!" some passing teenager shouted back, "Jesus loves you!" I also had a laugh when Susan and I were made up as corpses. The horror and blood make up was so over the top, I said, "Let's go to the local drive-through and get lunch. We can do a beckoning wave to the girl in the drive-through and say 'Room for one more, room for one more.'" (It's from an old Twilight Zone episode). I'd had a little to do with the SF Con scene, marketing a comedy audio play I made which was a parody of Star Wars and Star Trek. I met a few interesting people at them. Aussie fans are very laid back, easy going people, very approachable. They love their SF and love to discuss the minute details of the good and bad. They tend to be very, very informed people, but there's not a lot of hero worship for celebrities, Australians like famous people, but they tend not to put them above themselves. I think my ex-girlfriend Jennifer was the one who contacted Aussiecon and they were happy for me to screen "Maddox" sight unseen. Looking back, I was foolish to do what I did, but I'm still proud that so many people saw it and not all of them failed to see its potential. While a bit of a train-wreck, that was a better learning experience than a year of film school. Pain is a great teacher. "Next up, Damon Dark was screened on Channel 31 for five weeks, on Thursday ...Jennifer Douglas's Mother Faye, played the part and she was bloody BRILLIANT! A perfect performance! Please discuss your actors . There was a lot of concern from Andrew Dunn about the lack of rehearsals, but there just wasn't time. Karl Siemon and I met once a week for about three months and each week we went over what we wanted to shoot, we nutted out the ways we wanted it shot and scribbed notes on the script and then once a week the actors came by and we just said, "Okay, today we're doing this." Dark Reflection Part 3 Actually, Karl was great, he got call sheets organised and emailed or posted out to people. But it was a case of read through, run through, shoot it. It was very much a case of getting it on screen any way you could. I was told by a famous film Producer once, "get your film made, get your idea out there, any way that you can, just get it done and get it out there." I agree with that. So many things started in cheap, rushed productions, but if the idea had potential, it grew over time into something bigger and better. Dark Reflection Part 4 "Mike Seager, who had done the music for the Channel 31 series," Please give details about the music. Mike's a very talented guy, a working musician with a home studio. He and I since became friends but at the time, he simply went and knocked out this piece of music after a few words from me about the project. I told him "Even if I explained at length exactly what I wanted, you couldn't have done it more perfectly. It's exactly what I want." I love the theme and I think it's really a terrific signature for Damon Dark. "Adrian is also editing a novel of Damon Dark and is experimenting with audio dramas." How are these projects coming along? There are eleven Damon Dark adventures on You Tube at the present and I make no bones about the fact that in terms of production there is a lot of variation in quality. Some are quite good, some are very amateurish, some are purely experimental, but they are all cases of me trying to simply get my ideas out there, get this character and situation across to the people. Dark Reflection Part Five I've learnt a lot from putting stuff on You Tube, I think the net has provided a great new playground in which to reach and audience and experiment with what a film maker and story teller can do. You also get feedback. I've had a lot of four and five star ratings and some great enthusiastic comments from people. Some of my subscribers are also film makers, many of them are very talented and clever people, too. I've had some negative responses at times, too, and that's also good because it forces you to work harder and try new things to try to reach the audience and please the people. At the end of the day, I think of how Gene Roddenberry's own father apparently apologised to people after they saw the first ever episode of Star Trek because he thought it was so bad, or how the actors in the first ever pilot ep of Doctor Who said "we all thought we were going to be back on unemployment the very next week, it was so bad." My first ever reviews said "Damon Dark failed to make the grade." But in all these cases, it's persistence, it's developing the potential of your creation and making it grow until you find a way to make the thing exciting. A comic book character like Superman started on radio, then became a low budget TV show and the TV show was such a success it ended up being made into a movie in 1977 and by then Superman's father was played by Marlon Brando who was arguably the biggest star in the world at the time. In the pilot for the TV series, Superman's father was played by someone I couldn't name and have never heard of. But that is what happens, things have humble beginnings and they grow and progress. The first ever Bond novel didn't sell too well, it's just been made into a hit movie about half a century later. I hope I live to see Damon Dark become a huge success. I'd love to see other writers get a chance to write SF adventure stories by writing for my character, I'd like to see it proliferate in all kinds of media. I've got a book waiting to be published, and two of the adventures on You Tube are basically audio plays with pictures added. I see no limits and I see no reason why this idea can't go on and on. A guy who probes into the unknown and fights the forces of evil. That's Damon Dark. His world is shadowy and full of aliens and menaces from beyond. That's a basic idea that you can do almost anything with. "The sky is not the limit, the limitless reaches of the Universe are the limit." View the rest of the Damon Dark adventures at YouTube. Visit the official website: http://straker11.tripod.com/index.html Return to: The Thunder Child Reviews Index Click on the icons for new features in The Thunder Child. Radiation Theater: 1950s Sci Fi Movies Discussion Boards The Sand Rock Sentinel: Ripped From the Headlines of 1950s Sci Fi Films

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