Soul Searcher: November 19th 2003

BUNGLING FILM CREW DESTROY PRICELESS BOOK COLLECTION. World’s largest chained library ruined by low budget production team.

Cathedral officials were in shock tonight at the total destruction of Hereford’s Chained Library and its large collection of centuries-old books. Hundreds of valuable volumes were reduced to mush when shit-for-brains director Neil Oseman, 23, called for smoke in the sprinkler-equipped room. The crew’s smoke machine set off the hi-tech fire alarm system and triggered the overhead sprinklers. The fire brigade arrived promptly to shut off the system, but they were too late to save countless books from the deluge of water.

Not really of course, the power of suggestion. But almost. Fortunately, though the alarm did go off, the sprinklers did not. But there were a couple of minutes when I was told the fire brigade were on their way and I was just waiting for the sprinklers to pop and bill for millions of pounds to be handed to me.

Anyway, that particular balls-up behind us, we managed to shoot all the chained library scenes (about six, I believe) in two hours and moved on to the exterior of the Odeon Cinema, which will be transformed into The Academy nightclub via the magic of matte paintings.

Then it was back to mine to shoot Joe being approached by the Grim Reaper to be trained up, a scene which we dropped several weeks ago due to rain. We finished at about 2:30am, the only real hindrance being a bunch of drunken slags and bastards who staggered through Bastion Mews, occasionally attacking each other but mostly just shouting obscenities.

I got up at 9am again today (and oh how that hurt) and finally got the nightclub storyboards done. Now I just have to figure out how to shoot about 46 set-ups and a three stage martial arts fight in 16 hours.

Soul Searcher: November 19th 2003