The Fedora Chronicles: Cult Of The Cobra
Luke Mason shares with us his trials, tribulations and even discoveries from making his first "Fan Film."
WHEN MAKING A FANFILM TURNS INTO AN ADVNETURE IN ITSELF!

Never, did we think in the process of making our movie that the whole thing would turn into an archeological adventure in itself!

 

Living in Kent in the UK we were pretty much limited by our locations, with mainly low lying land (unlike Scotland where Templar’s was filmed) and pretty much green woodland. Thus the film had to be written around woodland. But to our surprise we found that within these local woods were caves, which were almost tomblike, called Deneholes!

 

 

 One of the chambers lit by torches

 

View from one chamber to another

 

 

We had pretty much written out all of our tomb scenes cause we felt filming from one angle against a brick wall would make the film look overly amateurish. But after doing some research into our local area and, in particular, a wood we had found and been exploring a few days beforehand, we found these amazing chambers located 20ft underground!

 

These chambers are called Deneholes and were described on archeology websites as:

 

“At this time, many theories were put forward to explain why these structures were excavated, varying from Druids' temples, flint mines and ancient hiding places to elaborate animal traps. By the end of the 19th century, however, opinion had polarised between ancient grain storage pits and chalk mines. Subsequent investigation and research by the Kent Archaeological Society and Kent Underground Research Group confirms that deneholes are no more than small chalk mines.”

 

The idea that they could be, potentially, druid temples excited us! Although the reality was most were sunk to obtain an unpolluted supply of chalk to spread on the surrounding fields as a fertilizer. We were even more excited to find the one of the still accessible deneholes can be found in our local wood. Accessible through a slip-down slope of a collapsed 8ft high chamber! Although the original entrance would have been through a 20ft shaft:

 

 The denehole we went looking for was described as follows:

“Very few deneholes are still accessible but one this Wood, it is unusually shallow with an uncapped 20' vertical shaft leading to six chambers. The roof of one chamber has collapsed and the hole so formed provides an easy entrance with an easy scramble down. The walls are disfigured with dates, mainly from the 1950's and are blackened with soot from a fire..”

 

We were excited to go and explore these 6 chambers. And aided with a hand drawn map from the archeological website and an OS map I had plotted the approximate location onto, me and my friend (Alex Field – Effect co-coordinator and Henchman 1 in the trailer of our film) set out to find our Denehole filming location.

 

Whilst walking through the wood we came through a cacophony of different locations and found about 20ft of strong rope tied to a tree, this would serve us well later! We came across cliffs, and rifle grounds that we could potentially use for filming as well as some weird wooden idols...    

 

A mysterious wooden idol found in the wood

 
 

The Rifle ground; the little pink dots are clay pigeons

 
 

1997

 

On getting into the area wood in which the denehole was located it took good 45 minutes climbing through dense woodland, over hills and depressions and getting lost numerous times before we climbed a few high trees to approximate our location in regard to fields surrounding the wood.

 

After the 45 minutes we were almost prepared to give up. We had used a reference picture taken in 1997 to try and find the chambers, and were slowly becoming paranoid as every tree looked the same!

 

 

Today (2006)

 

 
After approximating the direction of the road and surrounding fields we, literally, stumbled across the denehole to find a 6ft wide 20ft deep shaft! And just around the corner was our slip down slope.

At first we figured that the entrance had been blocked by a tree by looking just under one of the roots we found a gap no bigger than 2.5ft high. That was slip down slope and entrance to the chambers!

Long shot of the slip down slope

 

 

 

The entrance through the slip down slope

 

 

The slip down slope from the main chamber is entered, the small gap, top center, turns around a corner

 

After tying the rope we had found near the entrance to the wood to a tree branch we slowly slid down the slope; with electric torches at the ready. After sliding about 5 ft into the slip down slope we shone the torches down and decided it looked almost impossible to proceed. By grabbing hold of the rope and slipping on our backs a little further we found what looked like an even smaller gap in fact turned around a corner and opened up into the 8ft high main chambers.

 

Shinning the torches into to the small gaps above our heads we noticed that the roof was moving ever so slightly. Shining our torches into this area we noticed… SPIDERS. Lots of them and BIG! This was truly turning into Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure (getting lost with a companion and a map and now SPIDERS)!

 

Once we had slipped down the final decent we found ourselves in a 30ft long cave like structure 8ft high and almost cathedral like in scale! There were 6 chambers in total (included the collapsed one we had used to enter the denehole. The only light was that from the shaft above us and yet even when the torches were turned off it was pitch black

 

The layout of the tomb was as shown on this ground plan made by the archeologists, note the collapsed chamber in the bottom left, where we entered from:

 

Collapsed chamber can be seen in the bottom left hand corner

 

Excited by our new find. We went on to try out a few effects and screen tests in the tomb like structure. These are all shown bellow:
   

 

   
       
 

Ala Raiders Rappel into the tomb down the 20ft main shaft

 

After 2 hours of exploring the chamber, experimenting with the torches, rappelling and filming we finally headed home plotting our route to find this amazing location again. Regrettably someone had decided to let the tires down on our bikes and thus the journey home was long and arduous as well.

 

But, all in a day’s work of the Indy Fan come filmmaker ;)

 

Regards,

Luke

 

Pictures of our adventure by Alex Field

 

Contact:

www.cultofthecobra.com

lukmas@msn.com

masonfilm@msn.com

 

     
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