When Aaron Burns and his family decided to make a family-friendly action movie as an alternative to the “junk” they found in Hollywood, they decided to dream big and trust God. Despite having almost no film experience, the Burns family finished their movie four years late. They call it Pendragon; and it’s an epic action film with a Christian heart, set in Britain’s Dark Ages. Imagine Braveheart crossed with Facing the Giants. We sat down with lead actor/co-writer/co-composer/co-set designer Aaron Burns to find out how one family could accomplish such a huge task.

 

 

Burns: Well, four years ago my family and my dad’s brother’s family got together and decided it would be cool to make a movie. We have a decent-size backyard with a forest and we like to do things out there. We had made a few small movies before, and we thought it would be a great way to impact people. So we combined that with a desire to have an impact for the Lord and it took off from there.

 

 

Burns: To start, we wrote the script. The four older cousins spearheaded the effort. We did historical research, set out the plot, wrote the dialogue and everything. That took a year and a half. While we were doing it, we decided to dream big and then figure it out from there, not limiting ourselves. We had no sets or financing or anything. And then we just decided to pray and let the Lord lead us. We had a $6,000 budget that we all had saved up to start.

 

Then we started recruiting other people to help. We started with our friends and neighbors. Then we had someone help us start a Web site, and a lot of people got in contact with us through that. By the end of the production, about 600 people had helped us make the film, and we only knew about 60 of them at the start.

 

The three main roles were played by myself (the hero, Artos Pendragon), my cousin Nick (the villain, Cadeyrn), and my sister (the princess, Wenneveria). My older cousin Chad was the director. And then from outside of the family we found an assistant director, a director of photography, two cameramen and a sound designer. None of them had ever worked on anything as big as Pendragon before, but they were aspiring to be filmmakers, like ourselves.

 

We were all full time in college while this was going on; we wound up getting together during Christmas and the summers to make the movie. Our first big realization of how big a project this was going to be was when we tried to film the first scene. We realized how much work it was to get everything together. You need storyboards and shot lists and lighting and everything. We didn’t realize what a jump it would be to film on a professional level. We learned a lot through trying and making mistakes. We filmed for a week in the summer of 2006 and then again in the summer of 2007. When we looked back, we realized how far we had come as filmmakers at the end and decided to re-shoot a lot of the early scenes in Christmas of 2007. The Lord, as He did many times, just provided more funding from various donors.

 

Burns: The message of the story is that God has a purpose for everyone’s life and that what God calls you to do He will give you the grace to accomplish. Pendragon takes place during the Dark Ages in Britain, just as the Romans are leaving. We based it off of the few historical facts that are known about that time. At the beginning of the movie, Artos’ family and town are attacked and destroyed by barbarian raiders, and he is left with nothing. But he stays true to his father’s vision, and through a variety of circumstances he builds his life back up and takes a leadership position. In the end he is faced with a difficult decision between serving God, taking the easy way and the option that looks like it will be more appealing.

 

Burns: We couldn’t really say where a lot of the money came from. People would just keep volunteering. Say, for example, we needed horses. We’d pray about it and then out of nowhere a family from Indiana called us and offered their horses and land for us to use. The stone castle in the movie was actually this old French fort outside of St. Louis that they just let us use. The fort at the beginning of the movie was in our backyard. We sent out a letter to about thirty homeschoolers in the area and built it right in our backyard.

 

The final budget was about $80,000. It mostly [came from] people who just saw it and caught the vision. We sent out a lot of letters at the beginning, but a lot of time that didn’t pan out. Most of it was [from] people who saw the Web site and responded.

 

Burns: The fire is all real. Gasoline explodes. I don’t know if you’ve tried that before. If you pour some kerosene on a pile of wood and then put a barrel of gasoline on it, it makes a firebomb.

 

For the digital effects, my cousin Nick, who plays the villain, does a lot of work with Photoshop. Ethan, our director or photography, did a lot of work with the special effects as well. All the wide shots of the hill fort were created by him using the Adobe software.

 

Burns: Some interesting ones. It’s really hard to make things look old and worn out. An extra would walk across the shot and you could tell their pants looked like they had just been stitched on a sewing machine. We found creative way to make people look dirty. We went through gallons of black paint every day.

 

We learned a lot about how to shoot films and camera shots. We actually hadn’t watched a whole lot of movies before. That was one of the reasons we wanted to make this, because there’s a lot of junk out there. We started watching a lot of movies and studied them and learned why they move the camera where they did. We learned to ride horses, we studied a lot about the period. We learned how to build and scrounge for props, finding things at garage sales and on eBay and various other places.

 

 

Burns: There were so many. The one that stands out the most was when we were about to finish the big fight scene that takes place at the beginning of the movie. Things had been going very slowly the few days before, and we were way behind on filming. The next night there were supposed to be about 60 people who were going to be there for the fight, and we weren’t even close to being ready for them. We hadn’t slept for like 20 or 30 hours. It mirrored the story in the movie, which said that if the Lord wants you to do something, He will give you the grace to accomplish it. We got started filming at about 3 in the afternoon and went to about 7 a.m. Usually things get bogged down and go slowly during the shoot, but that night everything just went smoothly and it felt like the Lord was almost stopping the clock for us. We managed to finish the shoot with time to spare. That was the darkest part of our story, and it was cool looking back how the Lord did that for us in real life and made the message of the movie come alive for us.

 

 

Burns: The best way is to go to the Web site, pendragonmovie.com. You can see the trailer and read all about the production, and you can purchase the movie on DVD. It will also be available in most Christian bookstores by the end of February. If you are interested in hosting a group showing at your church, you can contact us on the Web site or email me at awburns@oakland.edu.