“Hitters & Critters”, adventure and role play
Dadi Einarsson is a graduate of Screen writing and Directing from The Icelandic Film School and his graduation film “Hitters & Critters” will be shown in Bio Paradis on the 15th of April.
Daði has had a close relationship with fantasies and science fiction from a young age
“Lord of the rings” is my “Star Wars”. When I was 6 years old I would sit with my family in the living room and watch the extended version of “The lord of the rings”, one disc per night for a whole week. During that week reality got switched off and this other, unique world, took over and I believed it was real. I took notes and jotted down memos. This world had rules and worked in a special way. I then watched the films again and again. Endlessly. Nothing captured me as much as “Lord if the rings” and it might be pretty obvious that I draw a lot of inspiration from there and from “Astropia” and many similar television shows that did one role playing show. For instance “Futurama”, “Community” and “The IT crowd”. But I always thought that the form could be explored further. Now I might antagonize Otto a bit, but “Astropia” is not a perfect film. It spends too much time just rolling before they start the actual play, the fun part, half the picture even! Nonetheless, when I was a kid it grabbed the imagination. An Icelandic fantasy film ! The bravery that that it took Otto and Gunnar to do it ! I love “Astropia”, no matter what anyone says! It is a fantastic film ! I watched it twice when I was making my graduation film. Once to make sure that my film was, well its own film with different themes and characters… the second time was just for my entertainment.
The script for my graduation film took a long time to develop and went through many changes. In the draft there were 5 players and one storyteller. Teddi was not playing a wizard. The storyteller was a neutral character that had no effect on the story and one of the characters had guns and everything. But I kept developing the script long into the semester, to my co-workers great annoyance, especially Jana the producer. I think I put forth the last draft of the script 2 days before shooting started…. But it was set in stone before that time. I just kept changing and evolving it.
In the editing process for instance, I moved the fight on the hill from the final chapter of the film to the beginning. It evens out the script structure, because now the film starts with a fun fight and ends with a dramatic fight. I also cut scenes where the characters of the film jump over a gorge, which was a big scene in the script and took half a day to film and the actors hated filming that as they stood on a cliffs edge at least fifteen meters from the bottom. But that happens, you keep rewriting the film.
This film is completely different from anything I have done before, when it comes to the scale of it. There are 41 names in the credit list, besides the special thanks. And when I was making short films by myself, it was only me recording, writing, producing, directing, sound recording and everything else that needed to be done. But at school I learnt to trust the people around me as much as possible and it is only due to the people around me that the film is a success and that is the way it should be.
The path is forward. I want young people to have more of a choice in watching. Films and television shows are far too often made serious and realistic, but there is a need for more fun and weirdness for the young people of Iceland. Let’s try to get young people in the cinema watching Icelandic films ! Fantasies and science fiction will hopefully make a strong entrance in the next few years !
Here you can enjoy a trailer for the film;
As mentioned before the film will be shown in Bio Paradis on the 15th of April and the price is only 1000 ISK, but further information is available on the Facebook event
We believe that Dadi has a bright future in film making and this is a great opportunity to enjoy from the beginning
