The Troll Hunter

Some of you have certainly seen at least a still from this movie, but in case you haven’t…

Let me tell you about Andre Ovredal’s Cloverfield-esque Troll Hunter, a Norwegian mockumentary about a group of students who discover what they believe is a government conspiracy to keep the existence of trolls in northern Norway hidden from the general public.

The Troll Hunter mixes the horror formula for The Blair Witch Project and covers the story like Cloverfield. Presented in ‘found footage’ style, the story evolves from a mis-adventuring group of college students doing a school project about bears. They unearth a government conspiracy about Trolls in modern Norway and eventually find the real thing.

The Troll Hunter Trailer

Three companies were hired to create the different trolls for the film. Rune Spaans represented the smallest company, Superrune! “I was responsible for one entire troll sequence myself, but I ended up hiring an animator to help me out. So, two guys did around 2,000 frames of a photo-real creature, eating a sheep, hitting a virtual stuntman with plenty of gory effects!”

When it comes to the production of The Troll Hunter, there were several challenging aspects,” says the VFX Supervisor of the show, Øystein Larsen. “This was a very low budget film too, with perhaps a quarter of the three million US dollars going on VFX.”

The design process had been going on for a while in pre-production. “Some of the trolls proved a bit trickier to get from the 2D stage into 3D,” Larsen continues. “We had good concepts, maquettes etc. which gave us a good start.”

Norwegians are very well versed in the story of trolls. They were the children’s boogiemen, who, fables had it, would reach into any house and eat the children who were still away late at night. “We have all read the fairy tales as children,” Øystein explains, “and it was very important to us that we kept that in mind when designing them. This was also the first time we were going to show trolls in motion and we did do a lot of testing to get a good feel for how they would behave.”

The Troll Hunter film PR team recently uploaded 3 viral documents for Troll Hunters… check ‘em out!

Despite being released in October in Norway, the rest of the world has got to wait a bit. The movie will hit American theaters (and VOD) some time in 2011, courtesy of Magnolia’s genre-friendly label Magnet.