“Explode? Impossible – it was made in Birmingham!”

I returned from directing another film at the weekend (a relatively relaxing experience) to find Andrew Biddle’s stop motion shots of Ezekiel on my doormat. They did not disappoint. The shot where Jonny actually sprouts wings looks particularly sweet. So that’s it for Andrew – another character takes his bow and exits stage left.

The next day I received the first CG umbilical cord shot, at long last. The motion tracking still needed a little work (it’s the world’s wobbliest tracking shot) but it was great to finally see a cord shot in the film. Well done, David.

And then today I received the rushes of last week’s highspeed film footage. My first thought was that the explosions looked very impressive and very expensive (which of course they were) but too big for the scale of the models. But the way they’ve been shot, it’s not too much of a problem. I can definitely cut them in in a way which works.

It’s official. Last night was the worst night ever on Soul Searcher.

I find it difficult to recall how the evening even started. Ah, that’s right, it was more of an afternoon. Everything seemed to be going well. The weather was dry. Jonathan had arrived with the train, which looked very good. Kevin McDonagh, Colin and I spent a while putting together Hollie’s buildings and generally setting stuff up for the shooting of all the train shots and the explosion of the brewery vats. I also found myself painting the wagons red.

As darkness fell, Stein Stie, the 16mm DoP, and his assistant Rob arrived and began setting up the Arri SR2 to shoot the vats. Toby rigged the pyro and Jackie Regan, maker of the model, finished it off by attaching the walkways on top – which were extremely accurate. There were 20 minutes or so of panic when it seemed Arri had given us the wrong gear and we wouldn’t be able to shoot 150fps, but Rob sorted it out and the vats explosion went off just as planned. Nice one.

It was then, as the time for the train’s debut neared, that the seeds of doom took root. In a nut shell, the train didn’t want to stay on the track. The old wheel problem again. The hours ticked by, whilst the crew ate incinerated beefburgers and set up the buildings, background lights and details around the railway line, all of which looked great. By 1am I was on the verge of vommiting from extreme panic. I had 25-ish shots to get in now only four hours. Jonathan said the wagons were ready, and placed them on the track. They wouldn’t go along. Wheel problems again.

Then the power tripped out, leaving us in complete darkness.

Then it started to rain.

Once the power was reset, I weighed up the options before me. I had to blow the train up at 6am, come what may, because otherwise I would have wasted a lot of money on the Arri gear, the pyro, the insurance, etc. But how could I blow it up when there were still 25 shots of it moving to shoot? And the damn thing won’t stay on the tracks.

Phrases of the “computer generated imagery” ilk were bandied about. I quickly put a stop to that.

There was only one real solution. Kevin knocked up an extremely crude version of the locomotive, simply to blow up. He then went off to kip in the van, because he had to work today, whilst Colin and I – horror of horrors – dismantled the earth embankment we had spent most of last Friday building. Sometimes I wonder why I fucking bother.

The rain, meanwhile, continued to fall. Gradually it became heavier and heavier until, when Stein and Rob reappeared on the scene at 5am, it seemed that we couldn’t possibly shoot. However Stein convinced me otherwise, and with the aid of a tarpaulin, an old towel and Kevin’s ropey mock-up, we got the explosion filmed.

So, a brief summary. Over the last week, two sessions of back-breaking labour building embankments and then dismantling them again, many hours loading things in and out of hire vans, UKP250 worth of damage to one such van, and hour upon hour of working in the pouring rain, wind, mud and miscellaneous unpleasantness… and for what? Two shots. TWO FUCKING SHOTS. THIS FILM IS TAKING THE PISS. I HATE IT. I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT.

We were so close. I can’t believe how close we were. I’m now sat in my living room surrounded by Hollie’s buildings and spiky Hell rocks, the very cool-looking locomotive and four pretty convincing scale replicas of the Rowden Mill goods wagon we filmed on last year, and yet it’s all useless because the DAMN THING WOULDN’T GO ALONG THE TRACK.

I hate everything.

Another year. Another kitchen. Another crisis meeting.

Your attention please on platform one. We’re sorry, but the Hades Express service to Hell has been delayed by approximately six days. Hades Express apologises for this delay and any inconvenience it may cause you.

My first concern when I got up yesterday was the weather. After two weeks of brilliant sunshine, I had picked the day when the heavens opened to spend all night outdoors shooting. Getting horribly lost on the way to location was a relatively minor inconvenience. Jon rung me every few hours to say he would be later than expected arriving with the train. Something about the wheels.

I had just taken up a shovel to begin digging the 25 metre embankment required for the train to run along when Jon rung again. If it were possible for a dead man to speak, this is what it would sound like. He had not slept for five days. Never in my days have I heard such a wretched voice. The wheel, that most ancient of human inventions, had defeated him. Failed moulds, materials too brittle and a slight misalignment which would completely derail the vehicle.

So I found myself sat at a kitchen table, sipping a hot beverage and wondering how the hell I was going to reschedule everything. Sound familiar?

We also managed to dent the hire van and get it stuck turning into a small lane. As Toby trudged up the lane with me after pushing the van back onto the road, he said, “It’s not always this bad on Soul Searcher, is it?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Various dates were bandied about, some of them towards the end of October. Suddenly I was struck by a vision of seeing in 2005 with Soul Searcher unfinished.

But in the end there was only one viable solution. We were already scheduled to blow up the miniatures on Thursday next week. We would simply have to shoot everything else that night as well.

Hollie Swain continued putting together the buildings and other paraphenalia she had made to go alongside the railway line. As well as office blocks and other earthly institutions, there were some spiky red rock formations – one of which looked like a giant Venus Fly Trap – for the Helllish section of the train’s journey. They were a really good match for James Parkes’ stop motion moat set.

So that our journey was not wasted, we spent the rest of the afternoon building the embankment. The soil was mostly clay and rocks, which made the going difficult, but as darkness fell we had completed our task. I was astonished at how readily the crew – Beth, Toby, Colin and behind-the-scenes cameraman Tom Hewett – got stuck into the digging, despite the rain. I asked Colin why he kept coming back for more punishment. “This is pushing it,” he muttered, forcing his spade into the unyielding earth.

I must confess that after that I was very glad we did not have to do eight hours of shooting.

Everything’s sorted for the miniature shoot on Friday. Not that there’s anything miniature about it, aside from the actual models. I am predicting the sharp onset of winter to concide precisely with our arrival on location.

I got some pictures through of the wagons, but I still haven’t seen what the locomotive looks like, which is pretty scary. If it was anyone but Jonathan making it I’d be freaking out right now.

The vats are wonky, so I hear. But they’ll all be straight and lovely by Sunday, when Beth the soon-to-be-long-suffering runner drives to Dartford to pick them up.

I keep bumping into people I haven’t seen for ages and their first question is always, “How did the film turn out? Must be finished by now, right?”

Busy, busy, busy. Various different things going on today. I spent most of the day on the phone and the internet. (Mmm, nice phone bill to look forward to.)

David Markwick was working on the look of the umbilical cords, so every couple of hours he would put a new test shot up on his webspace for me to check out, then I’d call him with feedback. At close of play today it was looking somewhat Abyss-like.

Alongside this, I was trying to sort out the 16mm gear for the explosions shoot. Arri Media have very kindly done me an excellent deal on a highspeed SR2 and lenses. Getting the gear (West London), the DoP (North-East London) and the vats miniature (Dartford) to Gloucestershire for the shoot is another issue entirely.

I talked to Jackie Regan and sorted out a larger scale for the vats. (Toby blew up one of the original small-scale vats and it didn’t look too hot.) Hollie Swain is still at work on the buildings and other background scenery for the train shots.

In between all this, I listened to the first version of Scott’s score, which arrived in the post this morning. Well. I don’t know what to say. Even though it’s in a very, very rough form at the moment, I sat through it alternatively giggling with delight and wiping away the tears it had brought to my eyes. For some reason, Luca’s theme had me in stitches, probably because I know Lara.

Also, yesterday I got some full res clips of the Moat Creatures from James Parkes, and for the first time was able to get a true sense of how that key shot of the train crossing the bridge is going to look. Nnnnnnnice.

This time last year we were scheduling auditions. Has it really been a year? Er, yes, it has. Unless I really did get that DeLorean up to 88mph just now.

The car in question, one eighteenth the size of that favoured by E. L. Brown, is sitting on a rucked-up towel (that’s “rucked” with an “R”) with some invisible thread trailing from its miniature bumper. Not a failed time travel experiment by Warwick Davis, nor an excuse to play with toys (well….), it’s actually a genuine investigation into what a 1/18 scale vehicle looks like on video, particularly as it travels over an uneven surface. It looks pretty good, I can report, though the smoother the surface on the day, the better.

I have a new CG artist for the umbilical cords, Mr. David Markwick. Fifth time lucky, I hope.

I started work on the foley over the weekend, which is perhaps the zenith of filmmaking tedium.

And tomorrow I get to hear the first draft of the score.

Okay, I’m officially fed up of making this film.

I got a DoP on board, Stein Stie, but after a few phone conversations with him I realised I had grossly underestimated the amount of light required to shoot on 16mm at 150fps. I could see the budget spiralling out of control. I had visions of three huge Arri artics parked down the road from the set with hordes of sparks wheeling out equipment and getting handed a ludicrous bill. No, not going to happen, even if I did receive my Gold Card this morning.

So it’s DV for the miniatures… Yes, it’s a train. I guess I can say that now there’s a dirty great picture of it on the site. The Raven, the express train to Hell. I still plan to shoot the explosions on film, which won’t require so much light since they make quite a lot of it themselves.

Organising the miniatures shoot seems as stressful as organising prinicpal photography was, but I’m sure it can’t be really.

I made a massive cock-up with the brewery vats miniature, as I discovered today. Somehow I overlooked the need for a discussion with Jacqueline Regan, the modelmaker, about what scale it should be. Only when the pyrotechnicians went to Dartford today to see it did I find out that it was much smaller than I imagined, which will probably necessitate a swift rebuild. I’m a menace to society.

Take a deep breath. Place your head between your knees. Repeat after me: “It. Will. All. Be. Over. Soon.”

Extra: 6.12pm – I’ve just seen some photos of Andrew Biddle’s stop motion Ezekiel puppet, complete with wings. Now I’m in a MUCH better mood. Fly, my pretties, fly….

Mmmmmm, explosions.

I voyaged to Hewelsfield, Gloucestershire. There, on the edge of a picturesque valley (and on his mum’s front lawn), Toby Stewart and his partner in crime, Alistair Burchill, blew up some crap. Let me pre-empt the lawsuit here and point out that by “crime” I actually mean “legally licensed, safety-conscious pyrotechnic activity”.

To begin at the beginning, Toby and Alistair – of Scorched Earth Pyrotechnics – gave me a brief tour of their kitchen table. This particular quadrupedal specimen of cooking room furniture was adorned with a range of explosive devices which would not be out of place in a James Cameron film. (I wonder how many government organisations have suddenly taken an interest in this website?) At the appointed hour, the neighbours having been forewarned, the two pyrotechnicians began setting off the multitude of explosives with which the front garden had been laced. This included a wooden board which had been rigged with bullet hits. Large quantities of foam were employed to put it out.

I asked whether they could do me something in a fireball. Alistair promptly disappeared behind the garden shed, re-emerging five minutes later with a small plastic bag containing some kind of petrol cocktail. This blew up very nicely. I was later shown a photograph of a fireball they had created previously at an airshow. From the size of the marquee in the bottom of the frame, it must have been over 50ft high.

We then got down to details, discussing the particulars of the film’s two main explosions. Fire or no fire? How much smoke? What colour sparks? Multi-stage or one big bang? It also turned out that another section of Toby’s garden was perfect for shooting the whole of the climactic miniature sequence. Vehicular access, scaffolding and heavy-duty power supplies were all readily available.

This evening I’ve posted on Shooting People for a DoP. I had been planning to shoot the miniatures myself, having long harboured a desire to shoot 16mm, but I’ve decided it’s not worth risking it. I wouldn’t want to make a dumb rookie mistake and wind up ruining the explosion shots.

I spent a lot of last week recording sound effects. Armed with a mic from Rural Media, and a pair of headphones which would look most at home on a Cyberman, I took a midnight stroll around Hereford, recording drunken revellers and a variety of air conditioning systems. This trip’s only noteworthy incident was a brief interrogation by a disembodied voice at Maylord Orchard, which wanted to know what I was up to. “WHY ARE YOU MONITORING?” boomed the voice, and then, “THIS IS SECURITY. COME TO THE SPEAKER. WHY ARE YOU MONITORING?”

On Wednesday I visited some family members in Malvern to record more effects, such as welding noises and various machines. On two successive evenings I made attempts to record that noise that rails make when a train’s coming – you know, the weird ssssshing kind of noise. Both attempts severely tried my patience, got me rained on and bore no fruit whatsoever.

“So there is a curse. That’s very interesting.”

For personal reasons, CG artist Duane Beckett has had to leave the project. Back to square one. AGAIN. A very long time ago I had a vision of me having to buy a 3D package, learn how to use it and do all the umbilical cord effects myself. The vision does not recede.

But for every exit, an entrance, this time in the form of a pyrotechnician (or “pyrotician” as Ed would say). He’s even offered to blow some random stuff up to give me an idea of what it’ll look like when we actually come to exploderise the models.

This afternoon I went to recce Chris Jenkins’ garden for the miniature shoot. I shouldn’t keep calling it Chris’ garden, since he doesn’t live there any more, but his mum Moira is always willing to help out. There are very few people who require mountaineering skills to tend their own garden, but Moira is one of them. As she descended into the steep undergrowth, playing out the rope we were using to measure whether my extensions leads were going to be long enough, and which she was also using to prevent herself from plummeting to her doom in the dell below, she pruned away some of the dense foliage and discovered flowers she had planted years ago and had not seen daylight since. Measuring the dell itself, we found it to be just barely wide enough to accommodate the 25m of set we need. A certain amount of landscaping is going to be required.