The Beacon: September 18th 2001

I showed the rough cut to my friends Chris and James. It’s also my first opportunity to see the whole thing from beginning to end. (Mind you, it’s annoying that I’ve made a film long enough to warrant a toilet break in the middle of it. Either that or I’m getting old. I’m sure my bladder used to hold up longer than 75 minutes…) For those of you not familiar with film-making, let me share with you one of my poncier allegories. It’s like producing a jigsaw. (Wait, it gets more original, honest…) You start off by drawing the picture on the box – ie. your script. You then have to go about making all the little pieces – the shots and scenes. Each bit takes a lot of time and effort, and whilst you’re working on them, you’re so focused that you lose sight of the bigger picture, in fact you completely forget about it. Which is why it takes you completely by surprise when you put all the pieces together and find that they match the picture on the box. Okay, the film will never follow the script completely, especially amid the compromises of a low budget shoot, but to see your plot there (and my god, on watching it, The Beacon does even appear to have one of those) and your characters developing, and your jokes getting laughed at (I don’t even remember writing any jokes) is pretty cool. Anyhoo, James and Chris made some very useful suggestions, mostly little things – rest assured there will be an “alternate scenes” section on the DVD – but the main topic of conversation was the graveyard scene. Another bizarre aspect to film-making is that something you conceived whilst walking through a graveyard almost 3 years ago, which in your mind makes such good sense and which looks cool with some music from The Rock slapped over it, can actually just confuse the hell out of everyone except you. James came up with a few extra shots I could shoot to sort it out, and I’ll run these by a few other people before filming them.

The Beacon: September 18th 2001