The TGS exterior on Monday night was quick and painless. Some of the crew had gone straight to Campions to set up lights for Van Beuren’s last scene so we could get it done fast because Richard needed to get the 8pm train back to London. After shooting at TGS me, John Galloway and Richard had to hang around for about half an hour due to a miscommunication before Edd came and picked us up to go to Campions. There we found that Alie and Colin hadn’t got very far with the lighting set-up because there was a homeless person sleeping under the bridge and they were scared, Edd marched under the bridge with a torch, revealing the “scary homeless person” to be a bundle of clothes. We set up the lights then found ourselves waiting around for the other actors to come over from make-up. Once everyone was finally there we were all ready to shoot when we realised Edd had gone off with the keys to the Mustang. Eventually we got the shot, quickly changed set-up for Richard’s last angle and finished with him just in time for him to get the last train.

We were able to take more time with the scene’s remaining angles, and finished at a record 8:20pm. Edd, who had gone off to get coffees, was highly surprised to get a phone call saying we’d wrapped. It was another two hours before we got home though, as we had to push the Mustang onto the flatbed which picked it up (the battery was dead), then we had to push it into the car park at the Green Dragon. Then we had to go back to Campions and wait for a second flatbed which was picking the generator up.

Last night we were back at Westons. The scene was a fight which was to take place in the rain. David Abbott had built us some rain bars, but I had been worried over the last few days that they weren’t going to do the job. Edd, Tom and Colin spent the day buying extra bits and pieces so we could extend or modify the bars. Secretly I was hoping for real rain, because I feared nothing we could do was going to produce a convincing downpour.

When we got to location we were, to say the least, a little pissed off to find that the apple pit we were supposed to be filming in, and which we had been assured many times would be emptied in time for filming, was very much still full of apples. After spouting various obscenities, I hurried around the site to find another location. This done, and a water supply secured, we hooked up the rain bars and switched them on. The effect was good, but not realistic. It was too much of a fine spray. I decided to try taking the bars off and pointing the hose up in the air. Thanks to the wonders of industrial pressure water supplies, a 50ft geyser errupted into the air and fell back to earth in a very cool Hollywood-style mini-monsoon.

We set up the gear and started shooting. Edd donned a bin liner poncho and rubber gloves in his role as rain maker, whilst Colin was on hand to wipe the rain-soaked camera lens after every take. Jonny, Ray and Simon were all absolute stars, never complaining once about fighting and jumping around on slippery concrete in the cold and the rain and the mud. It was Jonnny I felt most sorry for as he was fast asleep at 2am when Simon woke him up to swap costumes with him, and he had to put on his manky, cold, wet costume and come out and shoot his close-ups. He was shaking from the cold. I felt so evil. Maximum respect to you, guys.

David Dukes’ props took a beating. Watching the rushes this morning was very funny, After every take Simon and Ray would go to a nearby wall and hurriedly bend their scythes back into shape for the next take. But man, the rain looked good.

Last night we picked up the Doodies scenes which we dropped a couple of weeks back due to our sound recordist pulling out. Bill Dempster, a boom op from London town, came up to help us out and worked alongside Kyle, a student from the local sound college, to record the audio for the night. This was not helped by the mixer which James got them. A portable SQN? Nope, a full size mixing desk, mains powered. It was also not helped by my extremely complex shots. “Right, Bill, in this next shot I’m tracking from this end of the cafe to the other, they’re all speaking and we don’t have any radio mics. Okay – rolling to record…”

We all expected it to be one of those wrapping-as-the-sky-grows-light nights, especially since we had to pick up Kat’s close-ups from the previous day at Doodies, due to H. Lehmann Ltd. (Stoke-on-Trent) being dumb asses. Actually we wrapped at a fairly reasonable 3:30am. My favourite scene of the whole movie was shot last night – Joe teaching Heather to play air guitar. We set the camera up on a dolly outside the cafe window and shot three takes of them letting rip with the silly faces and strenuous hand motions.

Edd’s trying to get to sleep across the room. He stirs: “Don’t forget the cup of tea, leaving your producer to lug heavy objects up the stairs by himself…. If you say I’m whining I’m going to smack you in the face.” The event to which he is dozily referring is last night’s wrap when I pissed off to the actors’ house to pick up my washing, leaving him to cart my armchairs (which had been used in the Doodies scenes) back up the stairs to my flat whilst I enjoyed a cup of tea with Ray. My defense is that such director/lead bonding opportunities subtly enhancing performance and the working relationship on set. But of course that’s bollocks. Probably.

After three hours’ sleep the crew got up to shoot Van Beuren’s introductory scene at TGS Bowling. It was pretty straightforward and we finished just after 1pm. It’s now 3:10pm and in half an hour we’re going back there to shoot a nighttime exterior before moving on to Campions for another short scene.

The second day in the nightclub was equally disastrous from the point of view of the amount of material shot. Our martial artist, David Sheppard, didn’t turn up due to an injury, meaning Chris Jones had to step in. It took a while to get him made up to look satisfactorily scary. A couple of shots into the fight we split into two units. Simon Wyndham continued shooting the fight, whilst I shot close-ups of Kat and Gary in other parts of the room, utilising the dozen or so extras that Jason, our newest crew member, had drummed up.

David Dukes’ props are not standing up well. His swords tend to fall apart as soon as they’re used in a fight – which proved very dangerous as the blade of Van Beuren’s sword detached itself from the handle whilst Simon was rehearsing the fight. AJ and Edd had to go to Gloucester yesterday to buy a replacement sword. Edd has spent many an hour glueing Luca’s guns back together with a variety of adhesives, but we may have to remake one of them from scratch.

We finished at the nightclub on Friday evening with half of the scene still left to shoot, which means two more days of pick-ups in January. Depressing as this was, I was very pleased with everything we did shoot, particularly a performance from Ray which won him a round of applause from his fellow actors.

Last night we shot Van Beuren vs. Dante – the movie’s only sword-on-sword fight. AJ (Dante) was choreographing, since Simon was not available, and he was looking forward to getting some Highlander references in. Richard Brake (Van Beuren) had never handled a sword before, but he picked it all up in an hour or two and the fight looked fantastic. We were shooting under a bridge with a bunch of graffiti on the walls and some fluorescent tubes and dust on the floor which got kicked up whenever they moved. There were also lots of needles and other dodgy things lying around – in fact, as we were packing up to leave some guy with his home in a bin liner turned up, presumably to doss down for the night. That gave us pause for thought.

Half way through the evening I realised that Richard in costume looked almost exactly like Judge Doom – Chris Lloyd in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? “Arrrgggh! I’m melting!!!!!!”

Edd was astonished when he turned up just after 11pm with lunch, to discover that we had just wrapped. The night almost didn’t happen at all because our generator turned up without an ignition key. Fortunately a very kind lady in a neighbouring house let us run power from her place and the day was saved.

I had yet another dream last night that I was on set and all the crew had vanished. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

It’s 5:53pm and about an hour ago we wrapped,,, for the second time today, Last night we went to Westons again to shoot the conclusion of a chase sequence featuring Lara Croft/Greenway running about shooting things. Simon Wyndham came along to provide his unique brand of ultra-smooth Glidecam work, but there was a bit of a panic at lunchtime when we thought everything he’d shot was slightly out of focus. It turned out that only the last couple of shots were a little dodgy and they’re pretty fast moving anyway.

Towards the end of the night we shot Luca, Joe and Gary legging it away from some vats which were supposedly bound for explosion. This involved them running down a muddy bank and diving onto a skanky old mattress. This they did a good three or four times. On the last take Lara tripped and went flying. Like a true professional, as everyone rushed to help her up (well, some people did – I believe I stood around like a nonce) her first words were, “Did we get the take?” This Chris and Ray found extremely funny and all three of them had the giggles for the rest of the night.

Edd made a camero appearance as Distillery Worker no. 2, which I think he pretty much hated, but I thought it was pretty funny. We got back to Hereford at about 5am, at which point I took a quick bath then had to sit down and work out what order to shoot all the nightclub stuff in (now it had been reduced from three long days to two short ones) and how to light it. I gave up at just after 7am, went to bed for 25 minutes then got up to go to the Crystal Rooms and the shoot the fecking stuff.

Although I no longer felt tired, I clearly was since the plan of shooting double quick, possibly even employing two units with Simon shooting martial arts on one side of the club and me shooting drama on the other, went swiftly out the window. Well, slowly out the window. Nothing moved swiftly today. Pretty much no extras turned up, and the demon make-up took longer that expected, but this was good because it gave us plenty of time to shoot the scene’s hugely important closing sequence. In fact, by the time we were done with that we had only about two hours left to shoot the demons, who thanks to the two Nickys and Becka looked fantastic.

It was weird to wrap at 5pm. Scratch that, very weird.

BUNGLING FILM CREW DESTROY PRICELESS BOOK COLLECTION. World’s largest chained library ruined by low budget production team.

Cathedral officials were in shock tonight at the total destruction of Hereford’s Chained Library and its large collection of centuries-old books. Hundreds of valuable volumes were reduced to mush when shit-for-brains director Neil Oseman, 23, called for smoke in the sprinkler-equipped room. The crew’s smoke machine set off the hi-tech fire alarm system and triggered the overhead sprinklers. The fire brigade arrived promptly to shut off the system, but they were too late to save countless books from the deluge of water.

Not really of course, the power of suggestion. But almost. Fortunately, though the alarm did go off, the sprinklers did not. But there were a couple of minutes when I was told the fire brigade were on their way and I was just waiting for the sprinklers to pop and bill for millions of pounds to be handed to me.

Anyway, that particular balls-up behind us, we managed to shoot all the chained library scenes (about six, I believe) in two hours and moved on to the exterior of the Odeon Cinema, which will be transformed into The Academy nightclub via the magic of matte paintings.

Then it was back to mine to shoot Joe being approached by the Grim Reaper to be trained up, a scene which we dropped several weeks ago due to rain. We finished at about 2:30am, the only real hindrance being a bunch of drunken slags and bastards who staggered through Bastion Mews, occasionally attacking each other but mostly just shouting obscenities.

I got up at 9am again today (and oh how that hurt) and finally got the nightclub storyboards done. Now I just have to figure out how to shoot about 46 set-ups and a three stage martial arts fight in 16 hours.

Snatched from the jaws of disaster was last night. At one point in the evening it looked like the Mustang wouldn’t come because it wasn’t insured whilst it was in transit on the flatbed, we wouldn’t have a sound recordist despite it being a dialogue heavy scene….. Anyway, we got to location, the front car park of Hum-Ming Gardens Chinese takeaway, and started setting up the lights. “Right, I need these lanterns on,” I said, waving directorialy at the nice red lanterns that adorn the building’s frontage, and had been the whole reason why it was selected as a location.

“Er, do we have access to inside?” says Edd.

“We’re running power from inside, aren’t we?” asks Neil, now slightly worried.

“No, we have a generator,” says Edd, also getting worried.

“That’s for the other scene,” says Neil.

“Ah,” says Edd.

“Oh dear,” says Neil. “But didn’t someone call the owner to confirm we were coming?”

“It says ‘all sorted’ on the locations list,” says Edd. And it did, you know. Back in pre-production the Chinese takeaway had been one of many locations which I’d wound up sorting out, but although I got permission from them I’d never confirmed a date with them. My copy of the locations list made that clear. Edd’s copy had a crucial sentence missing from it. The only person who could possibly have removed it is me, though when and why I have no idea. Guess I’m just a complete tit.

“Right,” thinks Neil (still directorialy, but also a bit panickedly), “we have no sound recordist, I’m not entirely convinced we have the car, the lights that made this location so attractive can’t be switched on, we might get turfed off any minute because we don’t actually have permission and there’s a bloody great van parked right where the actors need to stand. I think we’d better call off….”

And at that very moment a Chinese couple happened by. (Oooh, I’ve always wanted to use “happen” as a verb.) In what, with hindsight, was an extremely rascist jump to conclusion, I asked them if they were anything to do with the takeaway. By some miracle they were. “We’ll get the manager for you,” they said helpfully and went a-knocking on a door just down the road. Presently the manager arrived and I politely explained my balls-up and asked if we could film on his property until midnight, switch on his lanterns and run power out of his kitchen. Being of saintly extraction (I must presume) he cheerfully obliged.

Within five minutes, Edd and Vic had located the owner of the errant van and got it moved, the Mustang had arrived on the flatbed and a student of sound recording from the local college had turned up (later joined by a friend). It was like all the bad luck we’ve had so far had been swiftly paid back.

The scene itself went very well. We had to do a lot of takes because of the traffic noise from the nearby main road, but the performances were compelling and the actors managed to keep the energy up right through to the last angle.

At about midnight we moved just down the road to do a short scene outside the Texaco garage featuring Simon “I was Joe in the original Soul Searcher, I AM HIM” Dovey as a Darth Maul-esque demon (nice one, Becky) and Nick “lead SAS guy in The Beacon” Russell as a random passer-by. Lighting it was a pain in the ass due to the fact that we couldn’t put lights on the forecourt, but finally got it done, headed back to the house for a brief production meeting, then went to bed.

I got up at 9am today in order to start storyboarding the nightclub scene, which we’ve finally confirmed a location for, but it’s now almost 11:30 and I’ve so far managed to find many other things to do instead – ordering bulbs, writing cheques, getting films developed… er, writing this extremely long journal entry. Bollocks, must go storyboard. Bye.

EDD: This is Edd here, Neil is now sitting and watching the rushes from last night and laughing at Ray’s comedy west country accident. From my AD/Producer type view point the production meeting we had last night was very helpfull, getting everyones responsibilities sorted and who’s phoning who, recently because we have had so much to do the lines have become blurred. Oopps should go Neil’s threatening to fire everyone again. Oh, and thanks to Joe Potts for his message of luck.

I finished the trailer at 6am that night, but it was worth it from the point of view of cast and crew morale. Last night we shot a critical scene from the end of the movie at Churchill Gardens. I felt like I should be doing more – getting bigger performances, or doing something more interesting with the camera. I don’t know, maybe I screwed it up. I haven’t watched the rushes yet so maybe it’s fine and I’m just worrying about nothing. Our second scene of the night was a straight forward dialogue one between Joe and Gary. We were on the clock because our sound recordist had to go at midnight, but we got it done okay. There was a slot in the night’s schedule for pick-ups, but the production team had overlooked it and not booked anything in, so it was relatively short night.

The last three nights of filming took place in and around railway wagons at Rowden Mill Station near Bromyard – a giant, privately owned trainset. Two of the days concentrated on martial arts fights between Ray and AJ, one of them on top of the roof of the wagons. Ray said he spent the whole night being scared. It’s a long way to fall.

The Thursday was to centre around Luca and Gary’s action elsewhere on the train, and was to be the first day of shooting with Jonny Lewis’ sweet ’73 Mustang. Unfortunately James smegged up the insurance and we discovered at the last minute that Lara was only insured to drive the car at location, not to or from location. It was exceedingly frustrating to have to drop yet another scene, but despite that the night overran by a good hour and a half, probably due to us all being knackered, but yet again resulted in footage which exceeded my expectations.

Thanks to the various dropped days, last week was the first time we had shot for five consecutive days and we were all feeling it by the end of Friday night. Today’s day off was extremely welcome. I slept until 4pm, went out for a nice pub meal then sat watching films with Kat and Edd for six hours. It’s now 1:21am and I’ve returned to my flat to try and finish the trailer. So I guess I’d better get on with it.

I’m watching Back To The Future 2 again. It’s the only one I’ve got on VHS – my DVD player’s now at the actors’ house. Damn it. Still, it is the best one.

The second half of the multistorey car park scene formed the bulk of last night’s shooting. Anneka Thurgood, Sarah Fletcher and Lisa [arggh, can’t remember your surname, sorry] arrived to play victimised clubber girls to Tom’s demon. Anneka and Sarah both had to do a lot of lying on the cold skanky car park floor in skimpy clubber gear, but they seemed to enjoy it. Becky, our new make-up artist, did some sterling work on cuts and grazes.

We finished that up at about half two and nipped over the road to Rural Media to reshoot another of the scenes from Joe’s flat. It took no time at all and we wrapped an hour early. “Hey you, get your damn hands off of her…” Sorry, concentration slip. “Marty, the entire future depends on you finding Biff and getting that book back.”

We lost yet ANOTHER day’s shooting on Sunday, this time due to our sound recordist dropping out at the last moment. We can pick it up before the end of the month, but it’s going to result in an insanely intense few days in the middle of a fortnight without a day off. But it’s got to be done.

The one blessing of all these dropped days is the time it’s given me to edit. Having seen it start to come together I feel so much better about the whole thing. By the way, for those of you eagerly awaiting a trailer I actually got round to starting on it yesterday, but it may be a while before it’s finished. Plus it has the music from Speed on it at the moment, so it probably won’t make it on to this site for copyright reasons.

Last night we shot another demon fight at the Leftbank Village. It was quite a laid back evening – it was never a scene that was going to take a whole night to shoot, so we scheduled in a reshoot of one of the scene’s in Joe’s flat for afterwards. The fight, however, came to an abrupt end a few shots in when martial artist/stuntman Shane Styens, in his first day on the shoot, gouged a chunk out of his arm after falling backwards onto some concrete steps. We were appalled to find that neither Hereford nor Worcester’s A&E departments were open (what the fuck?) so he had to wait until this morning to see a doctor. I guess he’ll need it stiched up. Poor guy – he was so enthusiastic as well.

We grabbed a quick shot with Ray to close the scene (which we won’t be coming back to finish off) and moved on to my flat, which was scaling new heights of skankpitness. All the furniture had been piled into the bedroom so we could film in the living room. The scene was quick and easy to shoot (we wrapped nearly three hours ahead of schedule) and looked infinitely better than the version we shot a week ago when we were all completely knackered.

The last batch of props also turned up last night. Whilst some of them, notably Luca’s rifle, were fantastic, others had to be quickly handed over to production designer Ian Tomlinson for some modification/rebuilding ahead of their onscreen debuts this Thursday.

Right, gotta go – call time’s a-coming.