Shotlist:
1. Daggers, swords, helmets, armours designed in the workshop
2. Murat Efe carving on a steel dagger
3. Murat Efe talking about his designs
4. A knight costume created by Murat Efe
5. Murat Efe working at his desk
6. Various knight accessories created by Murat Efe
7. Volunteer students working at his workshop
8. A collection of antique knives
Murat Efe Prop House, which is located in Istanbul’s multi-cultural and historic Balat district, is a design house which produces accessories and costumes in particular for docudrama series and cinema films. Murat Efe, the founder of Prop House, creates designs aimed at many sectors and notably series, films, theatre and dance performances. Murat Efe makes the swords, daggers, shields, thrones and costumes which make the heroes we watch appear heroic. He himself has become one of the unseen heroes on the cinema sector.
Murat Efe, who is an interior designer by profession, began working in this field after a friend in the cinema sector came to him with an offer to become involved in a docudrama project. In his workshop, he has many volunteer students who give him support in his work. Every design which is produced in his workshop closely reflects the original and is worked on for many hours and days, the fruit of individual handiwork.
Murat Efe’s success is not just within Turkey but reaches all the way to Hollywood. On one occasion he was contact about producing costumes for a Hollywood and his team worked for days without sleeping. Murat Efe laughs as he describes that after delivering the creations to the production company, it thought that the products were not newly made but were actually antiques.
Among Murat Efe’s creations are the daggers which he designed for the television series The Protector, the first original Turkish production for Netflix. Those daggers have come to be recognized as a symbol for that series. Among other Netflix productions are Atiye and Rise of Empires: Ottoman
Soundbytes:
0:00:13 This is a place of production, a workshop of course. With design it is more periodic, again military and war materials, I think because that is what I am interested in. Requests come more in that direction. The armour for a man who needs to appear as from a particular age must be very solid, they seek something very solid because it will be struck by a steel sword. Whereas the other wants something very light and plastic, because the man is a dancer. If you consider the appearance, they both look the same or very similar but you have to produce them from different materials. 0:00:51
0:00:52 Firstly you have to interpret the reality correctly because, I’m talking particularly about the Ottomans, it was indeed incredibly colourful. I mean can you imagine, no man on the street is wearing the same headgear, because the colour, height and accessories on every headgear indicates which nationality and which profession somebody comes from, like an identity card. 0:01:12
0:01:13 It is the third season of The Protector, the Netflix series. In that there was an iconic dagger, it was designed, steel and a functional object. It was not a fake prop, we really created a steel dagger. 0:01:30
0:01:43 A project called Atiye started and in that there were a few more modern props. Throughout the second series of Vatanım Sensin (Wounded Love) a range of accessories was produced and for me that work was a great source of pride. Aside from private theatre, work is carried out for the state theatres and the opera. It is interesting, it is not a sector which is widely known but we have done a lot of work with dancers and this really taught us a lot. 0:02:13
0:02:14 I think predominantly we did a lot of work with docudramas, abroad and domestically. The more realistic you make it, everybody will sense that, from the actor and the lighting people up to the director. At one time I had a very serious discussion with a famous producer on this subject. The man stubbornly said that for the sake of reducing the budget, we were talking about a dagger, that it would be okay if I just stuck a photograph behind it. 0:02:44
0:02:45 I said that won’t work, because if that’s the case the lighting expert will have to take into account that there mustn’t be a reflection from there, the director will have to shoot the scene according to that and the actor will be done for, because his mind will be focused on not showing it from the wrong angle. Is it really worth it for a little bit of money? I don’t think it is. We saw a bit earlier the background when the man chucked it, but when you are performing, leaping about and wielding swords against each other, comical images begin to emerge. 0:03:15
0:03:16 With a business like this, it is not something you can do unless you are completely open to research and development. Hence, it involves getting tired, being defeated, sometimes it doesn’t work, again, again, again… If you are not open to this, it is not a business that you can do. 0:03:32
0:03:33 At the time of the launch for The Protector, seeing the dagger on those big billboards was in a sense also a source of pride. 0:03:40