The Beacon: July 24th

Yes! We shot a whole hour of tape today. More to the point, we shot EVERYTHING we were supposed to shoot. It was up to the summit of the film’s namesake hill to shoot LJ disarming the rocket – presumably by entering an invalid VideoPlus code. Unfortunately my camera’s mic socket seems to be knackered, as it no longer overrides the built-in mic when you plug in an external one. That meant we couldn’t record any sound today, leaving me all the fun of the fair in post when I try to post-dub it. Though even if we had recorded sound, it would have been all screwed up by the many members of the public who cluttered the hills today, thanks to the fact that it’s now the school holidays. There may be dog-walkers to paint out of the odd shot. The rocket’s pneumatics performed beautifully when we filled up the “virus” chamber with Robinsons Summer Fruits Squash and had Dovey (Jones) blow bubbles into it. We were then scheduled to roam all round the hills, shooting montage shots of bad guys Sarah Harrison (Bay), Simon Wyndham (Cage) and Jason Russell (Harrison) taking over the Malverns, but we couldn’t really be arsed, so we shot it all within a few yards of the summit. David carved another notch in his deaths-in-The-Beacon post, after being offed in silhouette by an extremely casual Simon. I made my second cameo, as man-walking-away-from-camera-who-gets-machine-gunned-by-Jason, and realised the full extent of the pain I was putting my actors through as I made rapid contact with the rocky ground. Then all that remained was the sunset scene, in which John MacLachlan (Cameron) was to set up the Beacon rocket. The sunset was not as spectacular as I’d hoped – in fact, it was a very dull, grey day – but we got the shots anyway, some of which did have a nice strip of orange sky in the background.

The Beacon: July 24th