For the movie fans.
I found this photo when checking the album recently. These are the whips Terry Jacka supplied for the Rundown movie some time back. I remember talking to him about that time about these and he didn't have anything good to say about them. Generally he doesn't like making whips for movies as the producers mostly want something odd, cheap and could we have them yesterday thank you. He said he made these with leather he had on hand which didn't match and he hoped they would disappear into some stunt guys prop box.
As a joke I asked Terry if he has made any good whips lately, and after a long pause he said something like- I remember about five years ago I made a good whip, it was a black sixteen plait, everything just fell into place with that whip. When you make something like a whip you have your ideal of how it should be, but sometimes your ideal is shaken up when you produce something that surprises you and you spend years chasing that new ideal, often in vain but not giving up because the next whip may become the next good whip.
I was a bit surprised by this at the time but I guess that's what keeps these old whipmakers going. Terry must be about sixty now and I haven't heard anything about him retiring. Has anyone here?
I asked him what he did with the 'good' whip and he said he just looked up to the whipmaking god and told him gently that this is a good whip, then he put a little tag on it that said 'this is a good whip' hoping that whoever bought it may wonder, then he bundled it up with the rest of the order and sent it out.
He says you can't tell anyone how special a whip is because they wouldn't understand, it's not how a whip looks that makes it special but how it is. Only the whipmaker knows, after handling thousands of whips he just feels the life of it in his hand.
sorry being a bit long winded I got carried away
littlejohn
[/img]
). In the movie all the whips look to be a single, dark color.
,) were the Jacka whips. You can really see the two-tones in that scene. The white is more like gray by that time, (lots of whip practice in the jungles in Hawaii will probably do that!) I personally thought they'd spray-painted the tiger stripes onto the whips all this time. Nice to see that it was not some fouled-up propmaster decision, (and now I need one like that too!)
I didn't know there were two suppliers. Thanks for shedding light on this. My mistake !