Client: Slung Low
Written and Directed by: James Phillips
Produced by Slung Low
Music composed and produced by Heather Fenoughty
Duration: 1 x 53’
About the music
This is a dark, moody, meditative and scathing film, with a score to match. Some of the score is distorted, discordant electronic beds. Some of the score is looped, minimalist violin. Some of the score is epic, symphonic orchestral brass, strings and percussion.
My aim was to bring out the seething, restrained undercurrent of civil unrest alongside fleeting moments of beauty and hope.
There are occasional callbacks to the thematic motifs of Camelot: The Shining City, Flood and The Good Book, all stories that take place in the same world – a dark, post-apocalyptic future where the human race desperately claws itself back from the brink of extinction through any means it knows how, by looking backward to move forward, by asking deep and searching questions about where our loyalties lie and what is truly important to us.
About the film
Set in a near-future Britain, where violence and civil war threaten to overturn a revolutionary government, The Magician follows a young man on a quest to find the only person who might have the knowledge to stop the burning and the hate.
Following the success of the short film The Good Book, Slung Low and Leeds People’s Theatre have joined forces with the brilliant team at Leeds 2023 to make a new film – The Magician.
A cast of over 200 people from across Leeds were involved in filming at some of the region’s most impressive locations, including the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District. Shooting took place in the evenings and at weekends over two weeks in February and March 2022.
Written and directed by James Phillips, The Magician stands alone as an original film and also takes place in the world created by the sell-out show “Camelot: The Shining City”, which premiered at the Crucible, Sheffield in 2015. In 2020 we transferred the saga from stage to screen with a new story, The Good Book.