Another night in the pizza restaurant with the Deep Pan Agony Aunt – sorry, I’ve already forgotten your name again. We seem to do less at these meetings than I expect us to, but it doesn’t matter because we always come up with one or two great ideas… which of course I can’t say anything more about, because I don’t want to give it all away. Let me just say that there are more opportunities for old stylee miniature work, maybe even some matte paintings, to take the last 20 minutes of the movie to another level. It makes so much more sense to be doing it this way round – having got the characters and the romantic plot firmly in place, to be developing these cool action scenes around that.

I want to be doing more between meetings too, but I know that the best way for me to spend this time is to let the film swill about in my head – brewing in my brain cavity, as it were, allowing it to naturally shape itself. As the ads say: “Schtop! This independent movie ish not ready yet.”

I was able to spend a little time whilst in London making some more notes on the first draft of the script and doing a rewrite of one particular scene. I saw some amazing locations in London, but of course our budget isn’t going to stretch to the extortionate location fees they’re likely to charge. But going out to the Courtyard night (for a change), I was quickly reminded that, few and far between as they may be, Hereford does have some beautiful modern locations too. For me, the three places that sum up the look of this film are the Courtyard (theatre that looks like an airport), Leftbank (nice modern restaurant) and the giant Bulmers cider vats (shiny metallic industrialism at its skyline-defining finest). All three are also very nicely lit at night.

Also over the last week I thought a lot about, um, how to put this so as not to give the game away… suffice to say the film’s finale will combine Beacon style vehicular action with cool fantasy miniature work. And I just came up with a killer Titanic-esque shot which goes from model work via CGI to live action. The mind boggles.

So we have a first draft of the script now; it took a full 22 months less than the first draft of The Beacon. And is about 22 times better. It was kinda fundy to read James’ half, which stuck to my outline a lot more closely than I was expecting. Things that I had put in, not really liking them but having no better alternatives at the time, he had fleshed out into really good sequences. The last ten pages of course were pretty much pure action – though very much driven by the character relationships – and I had expected to go through a process much like The Beacon did, where the third act’s cacophony of action sequences changed radically from draft to draft, but James has nailed it first time. I guess part of that is down to the fact that this script is so character-based, so there is a solid foundation to start from, ie. “What does the character need to be put through now in order to progress their arc?” rather than just “What cool thing can happen next?”, to which the answer could be almost anything.

Needless to say, given the way we split the writing chores, there are discrepancies between the two halves. These are mainly to do with the supporting characters, some of whom have been portrayed quite differently in the two halves. In one case at least, we plan to solve this by creating a smooth development of the character in the middle of the film from one type to the other, rather than rewriting all their stuff in one half to match the other. There were also a couple of little subplots I had added into my half to flesh the thing out which will need paying off in part two.

We also had a flick through some mythology books and thought a bit more about what the monsters would look like. James’ idea of them having tattooed faces, which I initially disliked, is now growing on me and we expanded it a little, starting to think of them as tribal, so perhaps some groups of demons could have a more Celtic look, whereas others might have an Egyptian feel or whatever to their make-up, and then each group could have different weapons and/or powers.

I’m off to London for a week now to shoot a corporate, so there won’t be any updates for a few days. In the meantime James is going to redraft the script according to the changes we decided on today, and I’m going to try to find time to rewrite one or two scenes which I have a particularly strong vision of.

A very nice day. The perfect day to sit under the funky architecture of the Courtyard, on an outdoor table, drinking OJ and failing to discuss Soul Searcher in any serious way. I’ve started storyboarding – an amazing seven shots so far – those poor rain forests…. James will have his half of the script done for the weekend, when we plan to spend an intense day gelling the two halves together. The Deep Pan Pizza Agony Aunt Waitress showed up again, but luckily James wasn’t there yet to demand inappropriate ex-relationship counselling of her.

Please welcome to the stage a new character, Mr. Doug Kirk-Patrick, who is designing us a nice spectral light background thing for our funding proposals and will doubtless be doing further design stuff on the project as it advances like some kind of spiky, punning army. DKP also works at the Courtyard, which is quickly becoming a hive of networking and general creativity, the likes of which have not been seen since the hallowed Doodies institution closed its doors.

I’ve started discussing what the fight scenes might be like with Beacon veteran and all round rumble-meister Simon Wyndham. James’ half of the script is coming on perdy sweet, whilst mine remains stalled a few pages short of completion, though I’m sure I can knock it on the head this weekend.

James went away to write the press release, to announce ourselves to the world.

Hereford is such a small town. Today was the art college screening of The Beacon, which went down pretty well, but whilst waiting in reception I bumped into a lady whose farm I had shot my short film Cow Trek on. After the screening, James and I did a little spiel (as in Berg) about SS and asked any interested actors, designers and the like to come see us afterwards. Amongst the hopefuls was the waitress James had asked advice from in Deep Pan Pizza a few weeks back. And a guy who had auditioned for one of my early films, Traction. Then I went to Tesco and the guy on the checkout had been at the screening. Hereford – population: 57.

We’ve built the foundation for what should be a mutually cool relationship with the art college. I can’t believe we’re not shooting until October – I feel like we’ll be ready to go in a few weeks.