We All Have Our Skeletons
Jan likes his coffee black. He is leaning back in one of the blue lounge chairs by the bowfront window. At this point, he is getting comfortable being interviewed by me. After years of dedicated work, he is ready to look back and marvel at how it came together. As Jan is digging in the archives of his memories, it seems like he is not only telling me about the early days of “Professor S.”, he is telling himself.
The road of an explorer is never a straight one. “It was very rock’n’roll,” Jan concedes. “There were many spontaneous decisions during working on the episodes.”
With the surprise casting of Paul as Professor S., Jan was eager to start shooting the first episodes. “The film element was part of the idea from the very beginning,” Jan explains. “During my work in schools, I noticed how people used computers and media,” he continues. Seeing how many teachers used films as part of class inspired Jan to what would become LudInc’s signature dish: a storyline delivered in entertaining episodes with cliffhangers that require the audience to become active and add to the show in knowledge and character.
Bringing together both the entertainment and the educational aspects was Jan’s biggest accomplishment in those early stages of writing. A one-man operation for good parts of the early way, Jan had to step out of his comfort zone of composing and producing by having to divide his attention between all aspects of filmmaking, including camera work or the prop department. Jan soon found out that passion projects have a way of screaming for attention from all different angles simultaneously. What counts, though, is not how much you know but how well you are connected. “At the time, I was working on a feature film called Dark Fibre, together with Jamie King and a very talented director called Peter Mann,” Jan remembers.
Jamie and Peter had asked Jan to provide the musical score to their film. One thing led to the next. “Peter is very good with technical camera work, so I told him about my idea,” Jan continues. “I told him that I wanted this professor guy to travel inside of his lab, because that is all I could afford in terms of setting,” he laughs. “I said: ‘Inside the lab, there is a window. How can I make scenes appear in the window?’ Peter gave me advice on how to position my camera in order to achieve this effect.”
All of a sudden, support was coming from all corners of the globe. Jan had charmed Mark Twain School headmistress Verena Thamm into granting him the school’s chemistry laboratory as a set. Tako Taal, Jamie King’s girlfriend at the time, offered helping with the set design. Leonard Cetrangolo from San Francisco, whom Jan had met while working in the States, provided valuable knowledge of cinematography. “It was nice having so many people involved from the beginning. People wanted to help because they really associated with the project,” Jan recalls, ”even though it was very ambitious. We were nowhere near having the resources to pull this thing off. It was a very rock’n’roll kind of production.”
Tako, freshly cast Paul and Jan went into the lab over a weekend in the middle of December. “We dressed the room so it looked like a time machine with lots of blinking machines and apparatuses. When I set up the camera, I called up my friend Leonard on Skype and I did a live cast of my laptop screen for him so he could basically look through the camera’s viewfinder and tell me how to adjust the camera and lighting.”
Every well-equipped school science lab comes with a skeleton and so did this one. It just briefly graced the corner of the lab setting before being handed a name and a role in the story, the sidekick the script had been missing. “Tako came up with that,” Jan laughs. “She just used it as part of the set at first. During filming, Tako crawled on the floor and started moving it around to make it come alive.”
“The skeleton idea was great because it showed the obvious need for a companion for Professor S. in the Time Lab.”
Find out next time how our skeleton Pierre changed names, nationalities and genders all at once. Skeletons are weird that way.
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance. –George Bernard Shaw
David Lütke, Editor