Dawn of the Dragon Slayer

I’m honestly hoping to see this show up in another spin-off of Mystery Science Theater 3000 at some point. It’s absolutely perfect for the riff-show format, and is of itself not so terrible as to render even some good natured ribbing unpalatable by association (lookin’ at you, Manos). And honestly, this movie sits in a really weird place. If it had been released exactly as it is in like 1983, it would have been astoundingly good. If it had been made in 1983 for the same budget proportional to a Hollywood blockbuster as it had in 2011, it would already be in MST3K and probably a cult classic by now. As it stands, I feel like the film does have one very important thing to teach us.

This is what self-started independent filmmaking can do in the realm of fantasy and sci-fi these days. It’s no Lord of the Rings, obviously, but for all you young or inexperienced aspiring filmmakers out there, Dawn of the Dragon Slayer should be immensely encouraging despite it’s general bad-ness. And heck, maybe you can get inspired by the fact that it spawned a sequel, and there’s a third one in production right now according to IMDB!

But let’s see if we can’t take-away a few more things from the film that you can use to improve your own low-to-no budget film in the future.

1. The Characters

First and foremost, probably the single biggest thing you can do to make your story feel quality is to put some serious legwork into characters. And honestly having just one single character who has a compelling arc and a sense of depth to them will pull audiences in. Dawn of the Dragon Slayer (henceforth known as DDS, to the chagrin of IT professionals everywhere) did not have terrible characters, per se, what it had was paper characters. Very detailed drawings of characters that you realized were utterly flat the instant they turned even the slightest bit sideways.

Dozens of the largest blockbusters do this, of course, but they also have millions of dollars to dump into the prop and VFX departments, so they can kinda get away with it. And while we’ll get to the effects of DDS in more detail later, suffice it to say they the movie did not “get away” with it. If even one of the two main characters had felt a little less like a paper-human (give us more backstory, yes, but also show us how the backstory shaped the character’s traits, and then show us how those traits inform the decisions they’re making now, as a starting point), the movie would have been far better.

Also, if the dialogue had felt a little less generic.

2. The Talking

This is something that’s really hard to do if the majority of your “dialogue” exposure is from popular media. That was the sense I got from DDS, that the dialogue was basically a hundred conversations from a hundred other pieces of mass media re-shuffled into a generic fantasy setting. Not necessarily cringe-inducing, but utterly forgettable and not charming in the least. Look, dialogue is kinda hard, I get it. Boy howdy, do I get it. To make it sizzle you can go one of two ways. Either absolutely everybody involved has to be a perfect conversationalist always prepared to match wits with those brilliant turns-of-phrase that you can’t actually think of until hours after the conversation they applied to is finished, or everybody involved needs to talk like an actual human. Think Aaron Sorkin in that first case and Joss Whedon for the second.

And yes, I recognize that Joss doesn’t actually write dialogue of how people actually talk, but what he does do is decide how normal people in his universe converse and then writes all his dialogue to fit. The characters aren’t all hyper-realized master wordsmiths, a lot of them are kinda dumb. But they don’t speak entirely in cliches and they don’t use some of the bizarre phrases we see in TV and movies, and their dialogue comes across feeling much more real as a result.

So yeah, less generic dialogue. Mixing the two styles is fine, especially if you make Aaron Sorkin’s style a character trait for one character and Joss Whedon’s style a trait for another and let them bounce off each other. Which would help with the character thing I mentioned in point one, come to think of it.

It’s like this is all connected.

3. The Effects

Look, low-to-no budget film. I get it. The effects and props and costumes aren’t going to be amazing, and I suspect the DDS production blew the majority of its budget on getting the location they had for a week of shooting, or whatever. And to be fair, it’s a pretty solid location for this story. Thank heavens you can just rent castles in the UK for a few weeks. All things considered DDS is not terrible, considering the budget constraints. But the issue arises from the filmmakers trying to do more with their limited resources than they should have.

There’s also an issue that I think arises from the actual director not being entirely sure how VFX works. See, early on in the film, when the dragon is only ever seen distantly, it looks fine. No, in the early parts of the movie the trouble bits are all related to fire. And not because the comped simulated fire was bad, necessarily, but because the actors had no idea how to actually perform around the incoming CGI, and the studio either didn’t have the time or the skill to make the CGI work around those performances. If the performances had been better about reacting to a thing that didn’t exist, maybe the CGI wouldn’t have felt so terrible.

That’s something that can be learned, no doubt, and I kinda want to watch the follow up films to see if writer/director Anne Black figured out how to direct her actors around future budget CGI.