The Beacon: Looking Back

Sometimes it seems like all I’m doing on this blog is celebrating anniversaries of things I made ages ago. Hence my desire to start making lots of shorts again. Like The Picnic, which you’ve hopefully watched and enjoyed by now.
But in the meantime, today is the tenth anniversary of the start of The Beacon’s shoot. The Beacon is a terrible 75 minute action movie about a bored admin assistant who finds herself the only person standing between a bunch of terrorists and their plot to launch deadly biochemical rockets from the summit of the Worcestershire Beacon in the Malvern Hills. Shot over about five weeks on a pitiful budget of UKP3,000, the film is essentially an excuse to string together lots of action sequences. Many of these are martial arts, some of which look a bit clunky in retrospect; some of them involve shockingly poor CGI (this project was crucial in forming my current opinion of CGI); and a few still hold up today as fun, energetic scenes – such as the infamous Cardboard Chase and the rollicking car chase. All in all, the film borders on the unwatchable, but I learnt a lot from it and without it I couldn’t have done Soul Searcher or any of my subsequent projects.
Of course I kept a blog during the making of The Beacon and I’ll be making all of that available online again later in the year along with lots more related goodies that may help you learn from the few successes and many failures of the film, but for now here is the brief entry I wrote after the first day of photography, a decade ago today:
“Did three gunshot effects. Were cool. Lit everything badly. Was rushed. Finished two and a half hours late. Tired. Watched rushes. Were better than it seemed whilst rushing through filming everything. Wish I’d scheduled more time for everything. Not as if I had to worry about extra budget to pay people for more days. Damn. Maybe next time. Ate Burger Star burger. Was Best By Far.”

The Beacon: Looking Back