The Beacon: September 1st 2001

The train weekend at Coventry Railway Centre begins. We did not start on time. “We’ll look back on this day and laugh,” Rick, our sound recordist for the weekend says cheerfully. “We’ll go, ‘Remember the day we started at 4:00pm?'” (Call time: 9am.) The reason? A late train, ironically. The guardian of the holy generators finally arrived and set us up with some power for our overly-blue-gelled redheads, and filming went extremely smoothly and fairly quickly after that. Richard Moreby joined the cast as randomly-appearing-bad-guy, filling in for Phil Smart (Sly) who had sadly had to drop out. Forseeing nightmares with the generators, combined with a simple case of having too much to do in too short a time, I had taken steps the previous week to hasten the filming this weekend. Firstly, I decided to shoot everything handheld. This also added a handy train-in-motion sway to the footage. Secondly, I drew floor plans of all the lighting set-ups. Anyway, shortly after 10pm we decided that some attendance at a public house was in order, and took a break from filming. We then came back from the pub and went to bed (in another train).

The Beacon: September 1st 2001