Connie's Warwick Davis Fanpage and Leprechaun Center

Leprechaun Behind the Scenes Gallery

A collection of rare production stills by official Lep 1 photographer Karen Ogle, and background information that was obtained with the assistance of Dave Tripet, the movie's Executive in Charge of Production. Many thanks to both of them! There's also a collection of storyboards and other production material - an additional thanks to Dave Tripet for his help on that!

Although the movie was shot out of sequence, the pictures are arranged more or less in movie order.

  • Part 1 - Introduction, Lep lair, Mr. O'Grady comes home
  • Part 2 - The Lep versus Mrs. O'Grady, Into the Crate
  • Part 3 - O'Grady collapses, Tory and J.D. arrive, Painting
  • Part 4 - Out of the crate, Finding gold, Treadmarks, Outdoor crew shots
  • Part 5 - Outdoor crew shots, Bad shopowner
  • Part 6 - Pogo, Diner, Traffic stop
  • Part 7 - Traffic stop, Home alone, Bear trap
  • Part 8 - Police station, Night shots, Truck attack
  • Part 9 - Truck attack, Severed hand, Deputy Leprechaun, Indoor crew shots, Tory at the well, Kitchen attack
  • Part 10 - House attack continues
  • Part 11 - House attack continues, Telephone, Roller skating Lep, Nursing home
  • Part 12 - Rolling home, Clover patch, Police car, Barn fight
  • Part 13 - Barn fight, Well explosion, End

Production materials:

  • Part 1 - Hide and seek storyboards
  • Part 2 - Pickup shots and other material

This black and white photograph came from the earliest days of the movie's production photography, before the switch to color slides.

It's a lot of fun to watch the Leprechaun use his magical powers onscreen. But there's a different type of magic in the filmmaking process, when a small army of people with a wide variety of talents and a whole lot of equipment get together to create the illusions that the audience will see. It's a fascinating process, and this behind the scenes gallery illustrates what the cast and crew had to do before the rest of us could watch Leprechaun.

It's customary in the movie industry to have a still photographer on the set to take pictures as the production progresses. These pictures serve as a record of what happened on the movie, and are also a source of publicity photos that can be used later on to promote the film. Most production stills fall into one of two categories: photos that recreate the action that appears onscreen, and photos that show the behind the scenes activity on the film. Most of the pictures presented here fall into the second category. The ones that fall into the first category are mostly little bits of action that never made it into the finished movie.

Naturally, the number of pictures taken greatly exceeds the number that will end up being used for promotional activities. After a while there's no longer much point in holding onto all this material, so it's customary to destroy the production stills and most of the other production records after five or six years. Trimark's copies of these stills are long gone. Fortunately, official Lep 1 photographer Karen Ogle made a duplicate set for her own use, and I was able to obtain a large number of these stills for my personal Lep collection. Some of them are quite recognizable because they were used in the movie's publicity campaign, and copies of some of the others were given to cast and crew members for resumé purposes. But for most of these pictures, the only copy still in existence is now in my hands. The pictures presented here are just part of the collection, and were chosen to illustrate the moviemaking process.

The on-set photographer has to work under very adverse conditions. It's frequently a low-light situation and flash photography isn't allowed, so specialized RGB film is used. This film is the same as motion picture stock and has a lot more latitude than ordinary film. The movie crew's lighting setup disrupts the lighting conditions in a major way, adding a pronounced glare in some areas and accentuating the shadows in others. Inevitably, some of the photos suffered from exposure problems, but considering the conditions on the set, the quality of these pictures is really impressive. In addition, color pictures fade with time (unevenly at that), and these have a few years on them. Fortunately, computer image-processing techniques can do a lot to restore the intended look for internet viewing.

Originally, the production stills were to be shot as black-and-white photographs, but early in the process they decided to switch to color slides instead. I have a total of 36 of these pictures. Thirty were on a proof sheet showing the pictures as small 1" x 1-1/2" thumbnails that don't enlarge very well on the computer, and the remaining six were larger prints. One of the black and white photos is shown on this page, and a few of the others are sprinkled throughout the behind the scenes gallery. But apart from that, the BTS gallery consists almost entirely of scans of the color slides, although I occasionally introduced other material when the situation called for it.

When slide film is developed, the lab stamps the processing date on the cardboard frame of the finished slide. The Lep 1 production slides are marked November and December 1991.