I think my mistake was that the individual vars weren't being passed, but rather an array containing the references to the hash and the scalar.

You're mostly correct; an array reference containing the elements are being passed, not just a plain array. Here's a breakdown that might help:

args => 
     [ # start an array reference
       \%formdata,   # pass a hash reference
       $filelocation # pass a scalar
     ] # end an array reference

# if you are passing this as an argument to your sub, you
# need to dereference it
sub mysub {
     $ref = shift;  # now we have the array ref

     # use array reference notation to access the elements
     $first_element = $ref->[0];  
}
[download]

--
hiseldl
What time is it? It's Camel Time!