According to amazon.com, Soul Searcher will be out on March 18th in the US & A. Pre-order it now for just $17.99! Their cover is pretty nice, even though it includes a stock photo of some random guy in a hood with cheesily Photoshopped green eyes. And a splash of blood, to make people think it’s a gory horror movie. (Ha!)

Back home in London I recorded the remaining shots for the videomatic – mostly those featuring the small-scale Lady Vain model used in an earlier videomatic. As I was shooting the plastic heroes and heroines jumping from the ship I was forced to come up with a few cunning tricks to depict parachutes opening, which I’ll probably use on a larger scale when the scene is shot for real.

The new videomatic, one of the most complex so far, was time-consuming to film. Ian’s Lady Vain deck model was about three metres long and took up much of the loft play-room where we were shooting. To represent the underside of the balloon, we suspended several bin bags from the sloping ceiling. This resulted in a lethal web of threads akin to that game in The Crystal Maze where touching the neon rods three times led to automatic lock-in. We managed to avoid tripping and falling on the model at any point, which was just as well since it was covered in cocktail sticks acting as deck railings.
Setting the model up took so long that, by the time Ian had to leave at 7:30pm, we were little more than halfway through the shots. The usual problems of manipulating the tiny figures were compounded by the bin bag ceiling and the difficulties of moving around the room without garrotting ourselves. However, despite the frustrations, by lunchtime today I had completed all the shots on the set and was able to pack it away for future use.
Merry Christmas!

Ian and I met on Wednesday to discuss a new videomatic involving an attack on one of the airships by flying beasties. I’ve been knocking up the creatures and some laughable props while Ian works on the set – which is going to be quite large, because it has to represent the entire deck of The Lady Vain.
There’s not much left to do on the Swordsman now. The next thing to think about is getting the set built, before which we need to lock down the design.

This month’s Impact magazine contains an interview with me in a feature by Phil Hobden about the state of British indie filmmaking today.

Bang. Pop. Fizz. As if anyone could forget the fifth of November.
I paid another visit to The Model Unit today. Mike was in the middle of motorizing the Swordsman’s internal gears. We talked about how it would be puppeteered and how the ceiling mechanism might work. Podcast coming soon.
In other news, sales agent Wysiwyg Films have signed a North American distribution deal for Soul Searcher. And the Bristol Comic Expo are going to screen it next year. Hopefully it will be better organised than the farcical screening at the Brighton Comic Expo in 2005.

Whilst pondering how to adapt the Swordsman scenes into a standalone short film (as well as being a pilot, I want it to be elligible for festivals) I got distracted and started writing a new draft of the feature screenplay. Ironically, one of the first things that changed was a Swordsman scene.
I saw Stardust this morning which, annoyingly, features a fantasy Victorianesque airship, though fortunately not as heavily as I feared. And ours are better designed. What annoyed me more was that near the end there was a shot of the hero’s hand trembling on his sword as he heads into battle, and it’s identical to a shot I had been planning for Dark Side. Do you think I could sue?

The Swordsman’s head has now been carved – and it looks just like Ian’s design – and the bottom half of him is all weathered and detailed.

The Swordsman looks fantastic. He’s big and wooden and wonderful. At the moment he lacks for a hat and lower arms, but then so did that doctor in The Thing just before he died. (Eh?) He has no inner cogs or detailing yet either, but the heart button is in place.
Nick and Mike both seem to be having a good time building it. They were working on ball joints when we arrived. Ian was very pleased with how his design had been translated into three dimensions. Coming soon: pictures and maybe even some video footage.
I forgot to mention, when the UKFC (UK Football Club… or Film Council) turned me down for script development funding, they gave me a “free ticket” for a professional report from Script Connection, which came through a few weeks ago. Obviously there was a lot of constructive criticism, but overall whoever analysed it seemed to rather like it. They complimented the dialogue, which I was extremely chuffed about since in the past I have been atrocious at writing speech, though I did put a particular effort into this area in the latest draft. Even if it brings me no closer to getting it made, it was a nice bit of feedback to get.