Hooray, Dora’s back!

Theadora Dane, who illustrated the cover of ‘Guardians’, is back in the UK after spending some time in Australia. Like me, Dora leads a complicated life; I’m a writer and an armourer, amongst other things, and Dora is an illustrator and an armourer, amongst other things. Obviously, we are going to be working up cover designs for the upcoming ‘Pilgrims’ – and a map too, as our adventurers are off on a journey. But, for us both, our other life in film is running full tilt at the moment. We’re part of team preparing hundreds of shields, swords, and spears for an epic feature film. Really, they don’t make them like this anymore and it’s a privilege to be involved – but scary too, because the numbers are huge.
My first big prop build, a great many years ago, was for the Richard Gere/Sean Connery King Arthur film ‘First Knight’. Having made the cleavers for the baddies and a lot of swords and shields for Arthur’s knights I was rewarded with my first two weeks on set on location. It was an outdoor night shoot and we had to wait until ‘cut’ was called, then dash in amongst the wheeling horses and armoured knights and take their swords, which had blades made from aircraft-grade aluminium and straighten them and use big ‘dreadnought’ files to scrape off any burrs that could cause injuries – then dash out before ‘turn over’.
The film industry uses the term ‘armourer’ in the same way as the military – meaning a weapon specialist. Films like ‘First Knight’ are confusing, because you also have armourers in the traditional sense, doing the armour. To make matters more confusing still, I do repair, remake, and adapt armour, so I’m that sort of armourer too!
An absolute new-to-the-business nobody, standing-by on the ‘First Knight’ set, I somehow got talking to the sword master, the legendary Bob Anderson. He told me that a lot of his trademark tricksy moves, like reversing the sword to make an underarm thrust to catch an opponent behind you, came from the Japanese martial art Iai-do. I had never encountered Iai-do, but after talking to Bob I found an instructor and studied it for two years, before it became impossible to keep up the regular training sessions. Iai-do is practiced solo, drawing a real sword, and making a series of cuts before returning the sword to the scabbard. It is graceful, poised, and deadly. The steel practice sword has a fuller in the blade and although the blade doesn’t make a ‘tsing’ sound when you draw it, like they always do in the movies, the blade whistles if you make the cut perfectly square to the direction of travel. If the blade angle is a fraction off – silence.
A while after ‘First Knight’ I worked on a film called ‘Rob Roy’. The fights featured in the film are reckoned to be among the best ever filmed and were choreographed by Bill Hobbs, who really made his name with the incredible fight in ‘The Duellists’. Bill told me how he (like Bob Anderson) drew on his background as a champion sport fencer. His particular thing was conveying exhaustion, the mistakes, the slips, the desperate struggle to survive, to make that last killing blow. In fact, good swords are light and move easily in the hand, especially if the fighter is experienced, but Bill was getting over the emotion, the draining fear, the flood of adrenaline, the desperate need to inflict harm in order to survive. The humbling experience of working with these amazing choreographers – absolute artists – informs the fights in my writing, and I hope that readers feel that the fights in the 'Players' stories, like the armour, are real, as real as I can make them. And talking of real and making – it’s time to get back to the shields!

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