Excalibur
Excalibur
A John Boorman film, shot in Ireland at Ardmore Studios, Bray, Co Wicklow.
With Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson in starring roles, this film was a landmark in their formative careers.
Battle scenes in Irish Mist.
No need for artificial smoke here, the Irish Mist was free of charge.
The forces of Evil
It`s always seems more fun to create the unknown, and not just a model of the known historic evidence.
Although these helmets and armour for the ancient Britons were not all evil, they gave Andrew the chance to express some imagination and create a meaningful character.
Tough battle armour
The battle scenes with numerous re-shoots, were a real test for the durability of the armour.
Material technology
It`s true these materials were not around in medieval times, but Andrew`s knowledge of tough composite materials, allowed these characters to come to life in a convincing manner.
The good guys
The traditional medieval armour is well documented in history, and so to reproduce these designs in aluminium was a relatively easy task.
Blood & Gore
The battle scenes depicted in this film were truly spectacular, with much use of watered down tomato ketchup.
Weapons
There was a demand for many, many weapons and so Andrew devised a production method to make swords on a truly epic scale.
They were made from hot pressed glass fibre with polyurethane foam cores. A rather smelly and messy process, subject to reactive combustion.
Serious weapons
The lads employed as film extras in Ireland really gave value for money, and their enthusiasm for accurate battle re- enactment was second to none.
To avoid them actually killing themselves, Andrew created flexible battle weapons from elastomeric Polyurethanes that allowed the armies beat the sh… out of each other.
Magical silver castle
A very large expenditure on the film props was spent of building a spectacular silver castle, which surprisingly, hardly ever appeared in the edited version of the film.
Andrew created this by moulding large silver sheets of thermoplastic in the shape of textured building stones. Every stone had its own bespoke texture, created by throwing gravel onto the mould before the hot plastic was sucked down with vacuum.
Castle drawbridge
Every medieval castle has a moat and drawbridge and the one at Camelot was no different. Since the caste was only a film set, the drawbridge still had to work convincingly, and hold up to many film takes.
Enter Andrew with his Polyurethane chain production technique. Each link was moulded on to the next with a clever configuration of split moulds, and slowly the complete length of chain was produced.
