'Tundra' creator to shoot feature film

WASILLA — Even cartoonists sometimes need a break from the daily grind.

Chad Carpenter said that MOOSE the Movie is an attempt to do something lighthearted in addition to his work on the internationally syndicated, but Valley based, Tundra comic strip.

And, yes, he’s heard the question you’re asking right now.

“Drawing a comic strip? How could that not be lighthearted? But it’s become a job over 22 years,” Carpenter says.

He says he needs these additional outlets. If he didn’t have them Tundra would suffer.

“I’d burn out, I’d get tired of it,” he said.

Which is kind of a roundabout answer to the question of whether he really has time to take on a full-length feature movie and accompanying graphic novel.

“I tell people I have no business doing this movie,” he says, in his usual self-deprecating style.

Carpenter and his crew hope to cast the film in Alaska. Auditions are scheduled from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday in the Frontiersman’s conference room. Frontiersman Director of Advertising and Marketing Cheryl Metiva is an assistant producer and event coordinator for the film and AJ Seims, one of the newspaper’s advertising sales representatives is an assistant producer.

Tundra — in case you haven’t seen the coffee mugs and playing cards and calendars and books “anything to make a buck,” Carpenter says — is the comic strip Carpenter created that got its start in the Anchorage Daily News. It’s since been syndicated nationwide, from the Caribbean and into Europe, something Carpenter and his team have managed to accomplish without a traditional syndication company.

In a video appended to the successful Kickstarter.com page for MOOSE the Movie, Carpenter said that he intends to apply that same do-it-yourself indie model to movie making, putting the full-length feature together without waiting for a studio or a production company.

He underlines that with a joke when, in the video, a producer chases him off a soundstage. Next ,he brags about having access to state-of-the-art editing equipment while jimmying open a studio door and then accidentally setting that equipment on fire. It ends with a threat to sell a kidney stolen from the actor who will be the film’s star, Zack Lanphier.

In short, there’s little, if anything, that Carpenter does without applying his sense of humor.

As for MOOSE the Movie, it takes place in the fictional town of Gangrene Gulch, Alaska and follows the tribulations of rookie park ranger Zack De Pollo. He and the townsfolk are confronted with a Moose-itaur (a just-as-ancient Alaskan equivalent of the Minotaur from Greek mythology) and then have to do battle with it.

Carpenter said he came up with the idea driving back from one of his regular public appearances, this one at a fair in Fairbanks.

“I’ve done film work before, but I wanted to do a full-length movie,” he said.

Brainstorming on that drive he figured he’d want the film to be set in Alaska but not with a traditionally villainous Alaskan animal like a grizzly or polar bear. Moose seemed an original thought. But how do you make a moose mean?

“You’ve got Minotaurs, how about a Moose-itaur?” he asked himself.

And thus the movie was born. He called his brother Darin Carpenter — who would become co-writer of the screenplay and of the graphic novel — and they got to work. That was about a year and a half ago. The Kickstarter page went up at the start of October and reached its $40,000 fundraising goal by Nov. 12. The total amount raised was $64,185.

Carpenter said he got nervous about halfway through. Not because fundraising was going poorly but because it was going well.

“I’m obligated,” he remembered thinking. “And that’s when I started to get a little panicky.”

He said Darin told him to calm down and hire some people to help out. Soon after he found Tammy Parker at a fundraiser for the Alaska Wild Bird Rehabilitation Center. Parker, who has experience in public relations, signed on to work PR for the project.

Carpenter said that helped, as did a few other hires made in short order. He’s excited now. Not panicky. Parker said he has reason to be.

“He has a very solid production foundation now,” she said.

That foundation includes Sons of Winter, a company with experience in production work which supplied him a director, Logan Dellinger.

After the project met its Kickstarter funding goal, Carpenter was back with a follow-up video thanking everyone who participated. (Folks can still chip in and get movie merchandise in return at turndracomics.com.) The video ends on a generous note as Carpenter opens up a cooler.

“Turns out I don’t think we’ll be needing your kidney after all,” he tells Lanphier, handing the organ back to him.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.