I have just signed on the dotted line. It really is a dotted line too. Not dashed or continuous. Properly dotted. Like ellipsis gone made. Like that bikini from the Timmy Mallet song. I saw him once, at a church fete in Worcester. Days like that won’t come again. Wackadays, as they were known.

So this dotted line was at the bottom of a distribution deal. A distribution deal with Wysiwyg Films. A distribution deal for the world excluding the USA and Canada. Those are the salient facts. As to who Wysiwgy Films are and how the deal came about, that’s a story for the next journal entry – one that will be written once I’ve got the images of a man in novelty glasses beating children with a rubber mallet out of my head.

Neil and I did some more work on reel three today. Things seemed to go very slowly. Guess we’d better get a shift on now.

Neil and I did half of reel three yesterday. Neil got very excited about the Moat of Souls flashback sequence. To be fair, it does sound pretty huge now. In another scene, Kurt Russell made a guest appearance. Sorry, I mean coat rustle. I rustled Neil’s coat over an ADR scene that wasn’t noisy enough. Mental.

Thanks to the recent arrival of my long-awaited new computer, I can at last resume work on Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher. That is, I can once I’ve recaptured all the footage – a tedious process if ever there was one.

The screening in Brighton was almost disastrous. A last minute room change and a lack of a crucial audio cable almost scuppered the whole thing, but after much faffing about setting it all up, with the audience already seated and probably annoyed from having been kept waiting for so long, it got shown. I’m not sure how well it went down, really. I think everyone was just waiting for the Alan Moore film that was showing afterwards. Still, they laughed in the right places.

During the week Neil and I finished reel two (not that we won’t be revisiting it, along with every other reel, once we get to the end) and moved onto reel three. The film continues to improve.

Neil and I remixed just over half of reel two yesterday. It’s frustratingly slow work and feels like painting the Forth Bridge at times, but it’s totally worth it. Soul Searcher is starting to sound like a real movie now. Looking back at some of the stuff we did in the original mix, it’s so shoddy. One scene had whole tracks overlooked. I guess that’s what happens when you only sleep three hours a day for a fortnight. I got another vocal cameo – as Clubber Girl 2 – just one word. What’s worrying is how convincingly feminine I sounded without any digital treatment. You just wouldn’t know it wasn’t her real voice.

I heard back from Jim Carl at Escapsim today. He’s going to track down some press for me, but he says the audience loved Soul Searcher.

Yesterday Neil Douek and I got to the end of reel one in our surround sound mix of Soul Searcher. It’s quite strange to be shut in that studio again after all this time, and it’s very nice not to be under such pressure of time. Of course, it’s taking longer than we expected. You change one thing and you have to change half a dozen others so the mix stills works. The film’s already sounding much better. I’m getting my voice in it a bit more. So far I’ve done a tut for Gary and a nasal sigh for Ezekiel.