Indie director Doug Cook pulls the strings in Bow Valley College’s virtual volume wall

Long before he shot the first frame, veteran Indie director and DP Doug Cook was putting in long hours, back and forth between his laptop and his work bench, building the mythical world of The Smolderkin.

It’s an off-world fantasy told entirely with marionette puppets, which Cook describes as a folk tale for adults, dark and gothic: closer to John Wick or The Crow than to anything in the family puppet tradition. For modern audiences, the strings of a marionette could be distracting, breaking some of the fourth wall and drawing attention to the performers– instead, Cook makes those strings part of the story – reinforcing the illusion of an alternate world.

“In the Smolderkin world, the strings are their lifeline. Things are communicated, and magic is communicated, through the strings,” Cook says. “Our main character, Lachlan is his name, is cursed by a group of witches and the curse goes through his strings and into his body. He’s basically at the call of the witches to do their bidding as they try to take over the Island of the Smolderkin.”

While not related, artistically the film builds upon Cook’s acclaimed Before the Sun – a short film about a 200-year-old vampire confronting his past in the moments before dawn. Using handcrafted props and effects, the four-minute narrative is selected for the Calgary International Film Festival, the Edmonton International Film Festival and the Regina International Film Festival & Awards, where it was nominated for Best Canadian Short Film. It also earned five 2026 Rosie Award nominations, including Best Director.

“I always love doing things with my hands, like stop motion and building things and props. If you look past into all my music videos I've done in the past, they all hav e some sort of unique set or prop that's a visual way of telling stories, something that's really interesting visually.”

The Smolderkin trailer was shot in the Production Hub at Bow Valley College which opened in the spring of 2025. The advanced facility is available for hire, and also gets used by students in the college’s film and virtual effects programs, as well as graduating participants in the Indie Ignition Accelerator program. Indie Ignition is a free program to support digital creative startups and is open to the public for applications.

Cook went to film school when students cut by hand and shot on film stock. Nothing resembling a volume wall was available to him.

“Having it at Bow Valley is amazing for students — to be able to use it and learn it coming out of school,” he says.

Smolderkin is looking for financing to create a full-length feature film, but that takes a lot of meetings and explaining the vision in away that captures the imagination. All this is happening while the full script is still in development, but Cook says the teaser shot in Bow Valley College’s Production Hub helps potential investors understand what he’s creating – and show show modern virtual production can breathe new life into the traditional art of marionettes.

“If you just have a conversation, nobody sees anything. Everyone has their own version in their head. This way you can say, ‘No — like this,’ and they go, ‘Oh, we’re on the same page.’”

The virtual production hub is a one-stop shop for independent filmmakers. A volume wall is basically a very large computer monitor that displays a virtual world, but there are several features that go well beyond that simple technology. The video background can ‘see’ the camera location, moving through a 3D rendered space as it shoots the action. It also communicates with the lighting, which has the effect of making the performance stage in front of the screen a part of the digital world shown on the screen. The facility also has a Vicon Valkyrie motion capture system as well as edit/composite suites and a dedicated dailies room for reviewing work as it’s created. The space is available for hire and comes with a staff of technicians available to support any project.

Cook says the LED volume wall is a huge tool for commercial production and independent filmmaking in the Calgary area.

“Yeah, I mean, it opened my mind up to, oh, we could do this, we could do that. We can put a treadmill on there and we can have this and we can have that moving and you know just you start in my mind anyway it starts becoming kind of like a Disneyland ride you know you're like ‘oh man!’ You kind of start to become an Imagineer – you're coming up with all these weird ideas with smoke and mirrors right?”

Cook’s biggest advice to independent or aspiring filmmakers is to just make films. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect or financed. The punk approach of ‘find a way with what you have and start shooting’ has served him well when commercial gigs have been slow – you can catch more of his work here.

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