Born of Hope’s back in the news again, this time in The Telegraph.

Lord of the Rings fan spends life savings creating prequel
10 February 2010

Actress Kate Madison, a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, spent six years and her entire life savings creating a prequel to the films.

Miss Madison, 31, spent £25,000 on the film, Born of Hope, which has already been watched by more than half a million people on YouTube. The story was inspired by just a couple of paragraphs written by JRR Tolkein in the appendices of The Lord of The Rings.

“The film has gone down really well with the fans and some say it is even better than the Peter Jackson movies which is amazing,” she said. “They have all been very supportive and would love us to make more films. We are all really pleased with the results and feel it can sit proudly alongside the trilogy.”

Miss Madison, an actress from Cambridge, decided to make the spin-off after seeing a fan film competition advertised online. “I didn’t know much about Lord of the Rings until the Peter Jackson movies came out,” she said. “These were fantasies without being completely unreal and I really enjoyed them.

“Then I spotted something online in 2003 about a Lord of the Rings convention which was going to do a fan film competition and it sparked an idea.”

The competition wanted fans to create a five-minute film in the style of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, but Miss Madison made far more ambitious plans. “I advertised for actors and got more than 100 CVs. I realised I was a little out of my depth so I shelved the project to get some filmmaking experience,” she said. She joined the Cambridge Filmmakers Network where she acted in and directed short films, then decided to give Born of Hope another go.

She spent all her £8,000 savings on the project and raised another £17,000 by posting a short trailer on YouTube appealing to fans for donations. Everyone worked for free, and Kate held down a job as an office temp in between shoots to help pay her bills. But the film, which was shot in the forests of Suffolk, will not earn Miss Madison a penny. “The competition was well over by now but I still wanted to make the film,” she said. “My idea was always to do something that was high quality – not just a running around in the back garden type of thing. So I ended up coming up with the idea for a prequel, which basically slots on to the front of the Lord of the Rings films, with the aim of trying to fit in with the universe that Peter Jackson created, without looking out of place with the fact that we didn’t have a budget.”

The film is set in the time before the War of the Ring and tells the tale of Dunedain, the Rangers of the North. The plot follows Arathorn and Gilraen, the parents of Aragorn, from their first meeting through a turbulent time in their people’s history.

“Aragorn is an extremely important person in Lord of the Rings,” said Miss Madison. “But we don’t know much about him except he is a ranger and becomes king. People wanted to know where he came from and what his people were like before he becomes king. I used a couple of paragraphs in the appendices and we followed a timeline Tolkein had written at the back of the book so we had certain facts to follow, but the rest we had to make up. I watch the film and can’t believe we actually managed to complete it. It’s obviously not the same level as Peter Jackson’s films but it’s a good semi-pro low budget version and we’re very pleased with it.”