Soul Searcher: August 30th 2002

Simon came over to view the fight locations, with Geraint in tow to film the proceedings. We started off at Maylord Orchards, where our minds boggled at the action possibilities – mmmm, escalators… mmmm, lift…. mmmm, balconies – dropped into Doodies, which is now officially confirmed as a location, then went on to the Leftbank Village. Although we seemed to come up with satisfactory rough blocking for the first part of the fight, we began to get doubts about the second part, once we realised that the owners were never going to let a couple of actors climb over the tiered balconies. After pondering this for some time, and briefly going up to the top floor, but not quite having the nerve to go into the extremely exclusive-looking bar and roof garden, we checked out the river bridges. I have, ahem, big plans for one of them, but we also came up with a good alternative if the council won’t let us close Greyfriars Bridge. Which, er, might well be the case.

Next stop was The Courtyard, where we got to go up on the roof, and lo, it was very cool. Consisting of several large flat layers, complete with a nice ladder next to a big boiler thing leading up to it all, it also provided a very nice view of the city and in particular Bulmers. Inexplicably, there were several tennis balls and a rugby ball on the roof, despite it being 4 or 5 stories high. After that we went to the multistorey, which we didn’t have any official permission to recce, and as a result were kicked out by the night watchman after about two minutes. Finally we stopped off in High Town, where we lamented the ever-present orange atrocities that are streetlights. The problem is, no matter how great this film looks, if we get a hideous orangey-pink sodium streetlight in shot it’ll instantly look like a crappy home movie. Which means we need to bring some very large lights of our own in order to render the streetlights little white specks in the background. Mmmm, expensive.

Soul Searcher: August 30th 2002