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An appetite for archery, Putnam 4-H'ers hear 'Hunger Games' bow creator
Thirsting for knowledge about their new passion, Putnam County 4-H Archery Club members were treated to a visit from a master bow maker Tuesday night.
And whetting their young appetites for archery was the man who created the bows used in the blockbuster film "The Hunger Games," Indiana native John Scifres.
The significance of Scifres' appearance certainly wasn't lost on Archery Club leader Peg Royer, whose club now numbers 167 as the second largest in the state.
"Every time a new 'Hunger Games' comes out," Royer said, "our enrollment goes up. All the girls want to be Katniss."
With a young audience eagerly listening during the club's monthly meeting in the Community Building at the Putnam County Fairgrounds, Scifres recounted his "15 minutes of fame" and how he got there.
Scifres, a second-generation outdoorsman and son of longtime Indianapolis Star columnist "Bayou Bill" Scifres, had a website dedicated to selling the orange osage wood that he cuts himself and prefers to use to create his handmade bows.
Out of the blue back in spring 2011 came an email from a Hollywood prop company that wanted to buy four of Scifres' finished bows, not just the blanks he had been selling online.
After going round and round with the potential buyers who obviously had no idea how to make a bow themselves, Scifres felt he was trying to teach them how when he finally asked what they were going to use the bows for.
"They said, 'they're for a movie,'" he told the 4-H'ers. "I still didn't know what movie it was."
Finally after someone else tried unsuccessfully to make the bows out of what Scifres called "part of a log," he reluctantly agreed to make four bows for the film. He got the blanks back on Friday and had to have them done the following Wednesday, so Scifres took on a rush job.
When he received an artist's rendering of what the bows were to look like, things seemed a bit more familiar. One rendering was tagged "Katniss bow," the name of the Jennifer Lawrence-portrayed heroine (Katniss Everdeen) of "The Hunger Games" trilogy based on Suzanne Collins' bestselling novels.
Scifres and his teenage son James had previously read the books together.
"That's when I realized what this was, and what this meant and realized this was about to be a huge movie," he said of the Katniss designation found on the rendering.
So working in his Indianapolis garage throughout a three-day weekend, Scifres made four bows for "The Hunger Games" undertaking, including a practice bow for Lawrence.
Overall he fashioned two functional bows and two created in a permanently drawn position with elastic for the string to relieve the bow tension for Lawrence. The latter two essentially serving as Hollywood props.
The bow Lawrence uses to hunt with at the beginning of the movie is a Scifres' garage creation.
When Scifres first saw the film, he said it seemed like his bow was only in it for only a few seconds. But when he saw it on DVD, he realized his handiwork was on the screen for several minutes as the bows are a focal point of the story.
Scifres was admittedly "bummed" that filmmakers wouldn't let him keep one of the "Hunger Games" bows, but he does have a replica he's made and he showed that to the 4-H'ers on hand Tuesday night.
"The hardest part about making the bow," Scifres said, "was finding horse hair for the wind-dicator (normally at the tip of a primitive bow)."
To make do, Scifres wove a few strands of his own daughter's hair in with the horse hair.
"We knew she would never be in the movie," he said, "so at least maybe her hair would.
"Then for the movie, they tore it (the wind-dicator) off, so she didn't get in the movie after all."
For the second film of the trilogy, "Catching Fire," Scifres made two bows for Katniss and two for Gale, her male counterpart.
Overall, Scifres has made 175-200 bows since creating his first in 1999. He showed the group his initial effort.
"My first bow still shoots," he smiled, "but it's as ugly as sin."
But after making it, Scifres noted, he was "pretty much hooked from that point on."
The outdoorsman told the Putnam 4-H'ers that he essentially made his first four or five bows using just a hatchet and a butcher knife, relying on a four-inch padded vise for stability. The bows often take 30-40 hours to create, depending on whether Scifres incorporates snakeskin or rawhide into the design.
And his bows have proven quite durable.
"I probably shot that bow I killed a deer with 50,000 times before it broke, and I'm not exaggerating," he said.
He recalled his upbringing leading to the bow-making venture after first hunting with a compound bow at age 18.
"My father raised me to hunt and fish," Scifres recalled. "My father raised me with a lot of respect for the outdoors and that led me down the path to traditional archery.
"The interesting thing," he added, "is that a primitive skill is being brought back by the Internet. So technology has brought back a primitive skill."
And that's right on target.