The Beacon: October 5th 2001

In a dimly lit room above a Malvernian pub, my previously piratical friend Mike Hodges – best known for helming seminal camp comic book adaptation Flash Gordon – may well be working on, or at the very least contemplating, the 3D visual effects for The Beacon. Helicopters, planes and Napalm are his domain. Mine is considerably more mundane. For in the world of 2D effects, it’s all painting things out, and combining shots together (compositing). I made a start this week by trying out the office window shots. (Sarah’s office was required to have a view of the Malvern hills, but the office we shot in had only a view of a cluttered lobby, so the hills need to matted in.) The results were depressing, and I may have to reshoot the shots using a greenscreen. The following day I tried out the screen effects. Namely a cinema screen, a laptop screen and a projector screen. These are instances where we’ve filmed one of the above forms of screen, but they’ve been blank – either to speed up the shooting, or because there was too much light falling on them – so a fake display needs to be added. The results here were much more convincing, and I’ve now completed all the movie’s screen effects. In the meantime, we’re going back out to Beech Business Park on Sunday to reshoot some shots from the opening sequence (it was dark by the time we got to them in principle photography). The only problem is we don’t have the jeep…

The Beacon: October 5th 2001