Wow, that was an anticlimax.

Neil and I completed the stereo mix at about 2pm on Friday, but we still had concerns that we weren’t going to get the sub-bass at the screening, so Neil researched the subject on the web and tried to produce a Dolby 3.1 mix while I got an hour’s kip. Sadly the Dolby mix did not work.

So the premiere happened. I was half asleep. I made a surreal little speech and it was on with the show. The picture looked pretty good on the big screen, much better than I had expected, but the volume of the sound was pathetically low, despite the projectionist insisting he couldn’t crank it up any more. Never fear, I know the sound system at the Courtyard goes VERY loud because some people walked out of my screenings of The Beacon in 2002 because of the excessive volume. So Borderlines attendees can expect to experience the full power of the mix, albeit a mix that has a few tiny mistakes in it due to us having to rush it, but most people wouldn’t even notice them. (Don’t worry, it won’t be loud enough to make people walk out, I promise.) Big thanks to Neil for going way, way, way above and beyond the call of duty to help me get the damn thing finished on time.

When I got home after the premiere I was deprived of sleep a little while longer as I ran off a tape of clips for ITV Central News, who are interviewing me and Borderlines director David Gillam on Friday, and a screener for the Cannes Film Festival.

I then had to get up early on Saturday to travel to Hereford with Leo Benedictus, who is writing an article on Soul Searcher for The Guardian. Leo had attended the premiere and was really impressed by the film. When we got to Hereford we had lunch in Doodies (it was a strange experience for Leo to see the place in real life after seeing it in the film) and Leo quizzed me about the film, my ambitions and all that jazz. He could scarcely believe it when I told him how little the film had cost.

Then a photographer arrived and snapped loads of pictures of me in Doodies, in High Town (perching precariously in a flower bed and getting strange looks from the crowds of Saturday shoppers) and on the roof of the Courtyard. Lucy Maslen, a.k.a. Clubber Girl 2, was working at the Courtyard box office. She told us that there are only eight seats left for the Friday screening and that Saturday is also selling well. Leo took the opportunity to ask Lucy a few questions, then he and I visited Campions where I regaled him with tales of frosted lighting stands and imaginary homeless people under the bridge.

The article will appear this Friday, the 18th, in the Friday Review section of the G2 supplement.

When I got home from Hereford I went to bed for fifteen hours.

IT’S FINISHED.

Just over 24 hours to go until the premiere, and of course the film is not yet finished. The last two or three days have passed in a blur of pixels and sound waves uninterrupted by such trifling concerns as sleep. That’s not entirely true, actually. I did get two and a half hours’ kip last night. I’m unable to drink caffeine (my heart is once again feeling the strain as zero hour approaches) and I’m spending a lot of my time slumped on the sofa at the back of Neil’s studio, occasionally issuing commands along the lines of “a little bit more” and “the Kurt Russell’s not loud enough”..

We just finished premixing the final reel and are now rendering off the files needed for the final mix, which will be done live with a real mixer. Then, if you can believe it, the film will be finished. Except for all the tweaks I’ll make at a later date.

So the question is: can we do the final mix, master it onto DVD and sort out the problems we’ve been having with the sub-bass in time for the screening? (We burnt a test DVD and went round to Lara’s yesterday to try it on her surround sound system and the bass was sorely lacking.) It’s going to be tight, but we’ll make it.

And if we don’t, it’ll probably be because we took five minutes off this afternoon to search the internet for the answer to that perennial question: “What were the first three words of the intro voiceover for Knight Rider?” The answer, for the record is: “A shadowy flight… into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.”

Four days to go. Neil and I reached the end of the film yesterday lunchtime and immediately went back to the beginning to start tidying things up. By the end of the evening we had reel one done and dusted. Today Neil will work on it alone for most of the day. I’m at home waiting for the post to arrive, which should include David’s completed smoke effects. I’ll then composite these in, thus finally completing the picture side of the film, and set off to Neil’s for what I’m sure will be a pretty intense 72 hours of mixing.

I feel like crap, having worked nights on the mix all week. At a certain point in the wee hours of Wednesday morning I realized that of the preceding 44 hours I had only slept for three. That explained why my head kept nodding as I sat at the keyboard, and why I could barely see or remember what I was doing five seconds previously. I was in serious danger of accidentally erasing an entire hard drive or something similarly catastrophic.

The good news is that we’re now firmly back on track. We have only twelve minutes of the film left to go through, which leaves us two days to go back over everything and tidy it up, and a day for the final mix.

David Markwick is hard at work doing all the train smoke effects as CGI, after the cell animator I brought on board utterly failed to deliver the goods. Hopefully I will be incorporating those into the film on Tuesday, which will finally put the picture side of things to bed. I’m very disappointed that I won’t get the quaint, shaky look of hand animation that I wanted.