It was with a certain trepidation that we approached today’s Gullet jump stunt, since the cold waters of the quarry have claimed lives in the past. But armed with a wet suit, and a swim to acclimatise himself to the water temperature, production assistant Gerraint Pounder survived his spectacular leap. The paltry three cameras which we had gathered to shoot this stunt were reduced to two, when an ill-timed query from a younger crew member distracted cameraman Dave. Still the other two angles looked good, and the joke shop wig and sock-filled wonderbra affected an apparently convincing transformation of Gerraint into LJ. As the sun continued to shine, more and more members of the public flocked to the picturesque quarry, making it increasingly difficult to film the subsequent dialogue scene, with screaming kids, splashing dogs and beer-bellied blokes hurling themselves at submerged rocks. Actually, that’s a bit of a cruel thing to say about Dave. Running as always magnificently behind schedule, we skipped some scenes and moved onto Ledbury Market Theatre, before visiting a picturesque hillside in the back end of nowhere to shoot the movie’s closing scene. There won’t be any more entries for a few days, as I’m staying in Hereford for a long weekend while we shoot there.

Today we returned to a location with which I’m extremely familiar – my mate Chris’ back garden. I say back garden, but you wouldn’t know it to stand in there. It’s a big dell, surrounded by trees, and currently with a swamp in the middle of it. This hallowed garden doubled as countless different settings in my early videos, from a simple forest clearing, to a post-apocalyptic village. Today it was the former, the site of the secondary GEV rocket, to be disarmed by our heroic trio, whilst arguing bitterly. And laughing. ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY. If it wasn’t LJ and Andrew pissing themselves at the very sight of each other, then it was the selection of cars, aeroplanes, lawnmowers and power tools that threatened to drive cast and crew insane. One sound in particular seemed to begin in response to the words “action” and “quiet please”. We finished over two hours late, my rather flimsy excuse being that we had to pick-up a scene dropped earlier in the shoot (though that only took 15 minutes).

Yes! We shot a whole hour of tape today. More to the point, we shot EVERYTHING we were supposed to shoot. It was up to the summit of the film’s namesake hill to shoot LJ disarming the rocket – presumably by entering an invalid VideoPlus code. Unfortunately my camera’s mic socket seems to be knackered, as it no longer overrides the built-in mic when you plug in an external one. That meant we couldn’t record any sound today, leaving me all the fun of the fair in post when I try to post-dub it. Though even if we had recorded sound, it would have been all screwed up by the many members of the public who cluttered the hills today, thanks to the fact that it’s now the school holidays. There may be dog-walkers to paint out of the odd shot. The rocket’s pneumatics performed beautifully when we filled up the “virus” chamber with Robinsons Summer Fruits Squash and had Dovey (Jones) blow bubbles into it. We were then scheduled to roam all round the hills, shooting montage shots of bad guys Sarah Harrison (Bay), Simon Wyndham (Cage) and Jason Russell (Harrison) taking over the Malverns, but we couldn’t really be arsed, so we shot it all within a few yards of the summit. David carved another notch in his deaths-in-The-Beacon post, after being offed in silhouette by an extremely casual Simon. I made my second cameo, as man-walking-away-from-camera-who-gets-machine-gunned-by-Jason, and realised the full extent of the pain I was putting my actors through as I made rapid contact with the rocky ground. Then all that remained was the sunset scene, in which John MacLachlan (Cameron) was to set up the Beacon rocket. The sunset was not as spectacular as I’d hoped – in fact, it was a very dull, grey day – but we got the shots anyway, some of which did have a nice strip of orange sky in the background.

Oh dear. I remember when it was all going so well, back in the first week. Now we’re lucky if we shoot 5 minutes of rushes in a day, let alone 5 minutes of screen time. After cancelling the SAS command post and related scenes last week due to the rain, I spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to find a time this week when everyone was available to shoot it. I managed to arrange one of the scenes for this afternoon, but it relied on us having an army landrover. But the guy that had said we could use his had rendered himself in communicado at some point over the weekend. Never mind, I thought, we’ll just use Mark’s (not the right colour or style, but a landrover nonetheless) and shoot it so I can replaced it with a military one in post if I can be arsed. On the way to location I got a phone call from Mark. He’d broken down on the way. This put me in one of those situations I hate, because my mind and body simply fail to operate in them – Thinking On The Spot. I got everyone set up at a clearing by the rendez-vous car park, but after trying to write a landrover-less replacement scene, and realising that it was going to be crap, I changed my mind and had us all go to the other side of town to shoot the landrover scenes in another car park… without the landrover. We successfully knocked off all the shots that we could without actually needing to see the elusive vehicle, and there was still no word from Mark. So we went back to the North Quarry Car Park, met up with the rest of the SAS actors and remounted the quarry climb shots we lost the other week. My next film is going to be about the drugs scene in Malvern Hills car parks, where all the motorbiking deadbeats go to skin up.

It was good to be doing something again, even if the weather did continue to shit all over my photography with its obstinate greyness. An hour or so at Hampton “Buckingham Palace” Court, was followed by some recce-ing of Dinmore Woods for a clearing. Then we shot a couple of odd shots of bad guys bursting into people’s houses – namely LJ’s, and LJ’s neighbour’s – before moving onto Shobdon Airfield. It was raining quite heavily and I would have called it off, if it wasn’t for the fact that some of the actors had been there for half an hour waiting for us. Still, they’d found the bar. The airfield is supposed to be in LA, and although David kept telling me that last time he went to LA it was wet and horrible, I knew it was never going to wash with the general British film-watching public (or at least the four of them that would ever see The Beacon). So I set it all indoors, in the wonderland that was the hangar, resplendent with expensive aircraft, which they very kindly let us tow about and get inside and stuff. It was almost like we had a budget. We finished at about 11pm, and were all bought beverages by a random drunk pilot.

Entirely disastrous. I was none too happy about the grey skies that greeted me this morning as I awoke, destroying my vision of a bright, sunset-graded rocket disarming scene. It began to drizzle as we hiked our gear up to the Beacon’s summit, and I became quite enthusiastic about setting the scene in a storm, with skies darkened and lightning flashes added in post. But after shooting a couple of shots of the rocket, the drizzle turned to squall and the wind turned to a gale, and I decided to call it off. Tomorrow’s shooting is also cancelled. Both days will now be done next week. On the bright side, I get to go to the King Monkey gig tonight, and can spend tomorrow cutting a trailer to bolster my flagging morale.

For the most part disastrous. You’d think, would you not, that finding somewhere on the Malvern Hills that you could slide down on a piece of cardboard would be fairly easy. But oh no. The two locations I had planned, and several others that I hadn’t, were not steep enough, or too rocky, or the grass was too long, or too short. We borrowed some unused shop window dummies from a department store for the Sarah-and-Cameron-fly-off-rocks-over-hostages stunt, but after much chin scratching and some lame dummy-chucking, we succeeded only in breaking one of the plastic people’s legs. The production assistants, Sarah, Geraint and Simon, then had the unenviable task of returning the generously-lent mannequins, and apparently witnessed a rather frightening degree of upset on the face of the shop assistant. (I understand allegations were later made as to the nature of this man’s relationship with the dummies.) It was 4pm by the time we actually got going, having hiked all round the hills filming odd shots of LJ and John MacLachlan (Cameron) sliding very short distances over unsuitable ground. We finally found a section of path steep and smooth enough to permit cardboarding, and used it over and over again in the Back To The Future stylee. Injuries were sustained when extra Leigh was assigned to dive on LJ when she reached a certain point on the path, beyond which death was probable. Leigh managed to split his lip in the dive, and kick LJ in the jaw, giving her a headache for the rest of the day. Being the tough, uncompromising director that I am (cough), I got her to repeat the slide many, many times – this time with her being responsible for her own cessation of motion. We also gaffa-taped the camera to one of the cardboard sledges and I slid down on my arse next to it to get those dynamic POVs. So it was all worth it in the end, but I should have tried it all out beforehand. I’ll probably schedule in another day to shoot more cardboard chasing.

After a single day off, we returned to the grind by filming the recklessly death-defying quarry sequence. First some simple dialogue scenes, started when we managed to find actor Andrew Hill (Dan), who had wandered off up the hill, not having seen the rest of us turn up a concealed footpath. I insisted on waiting for the sun to re-emerge from behind clouds for each take, before giving up around lunchtime when it became clear that such an idealistic Hollywood approach was never going to work in the Kingdom of Grey Skies. Then it was off up the quarry face, while David drove down to the Link Common to film some extremely wide shots of us little ants crawling dangerously over the rocks. Andrew almost fell to his death in a hilarious out-take moment which saw him sliding perilously down the loose gravel, grinning inanely at the camera. At the top of the quarry, the actors were dismayed to find that everything I had written in the script about having to climb into a little enclave in the impassable cliff-face, then haul yourself up onto the grass, is entirely true. After I’d demonstrated it was possible, in a world where humans live but once and gravity points away from the big blue stuff, LJ (Sarah) bravely went first – and indeed repeatedly – and Simon Widdus (Trooper Fields) performed an impressive fake almost-falling-off-and-dying-horribly. Then I filmed a lovely silhouettey, lens-flarey shot of the team continuing on up the hillside. And failed to press record.

If you’re a film-maker, and you’ve ever wondered to yourself, “How can I make my stuff look really gorgeous and professional?”, then, my friend, I have the answer. Blue gel. Get some diachroic filter, double it up, and slap it on your lights. Hey presto, footage that could easily be mistaken for a Hollywood movie. Definitely an excellent day’s work. The afternoon’s action scene had to be cut down severely, but I don’t think it suffered particularly for it. There was a little shooting outside the cinema, then we took a two hour break while we waited for it to get dark, filmed another scene outside the ‘ma – and were surprisingly left completely alone by the nextdoor night club queue – and buggered off home. I really do wish I’d set the whole film at night.

My favourite day so far, especially the morning. I thought we were in for a nightmarish time, filming atop the Worcestershire Beacon, exposed to the awful weather we were predicted, and harrassed by indignant Conversators. But although we did have to retreat beneath umbrellas for two brief rainstorms that swept over us, the weather was kind to us, as were the Conservators. In that we didn’t see anything of them all day. The morning’s scene was the first to follow my original vision perfectly, whilst the afternoon’s action sequence was modified but better for it. I can’t believe I managed to cast two leads crazy enough to dive onto bits of cardboard and hurl themselves down the side of the Malvern Hills. We decided to leave today’s night shooting for another time, when I would be better prepared and less f**king knackered.