Jonathan Hayes has a nice little workshop in a Bristol building mainly home to small engineering firms, complete with greasy spoon cafe. On the door is a sketch of a pneumatic sci-fi lady with a laser gun. Inside is a workbench strewn with tools, above which are three pictures of the rabbit from Donnie Darko and one familiar illustration of a screaming Banshee.

The real Banshee had been fitted with Barbie-style hair, so Jonathan’s first task was to whiten the platinum locks. The 30cm-high puppet had two rods protruding from its back via which it could be attached to Jonathan’s chest harness. He would then operate the arms with two smaller rods, whilst his close acquaintance Mr. John Moore walked along behind him operating the head and tail movements. Both puppeteers were dressed in black, complete with executioner-style hoods, and shot against a black backdrop. Colin’s job was to follow them around with a fan, blowing the Banshee’s hair about.

The day passed slowly, with many of the shots requiring alterations or repairs to the puppet. But the results were of the finest quality once the problems had been ironed out.

So what was the last shot? 409 days after Ray uttered the words “And another thirty quid out of my wages,” to a bollard in High Town, what was the final moving image committed to tape in this epic production?

It was an insert shot of the Banshee’s hand grabbing the chain link which hangs on a cord around Ezekiel’s neck. John Moore donned the Soul Searcher’s armour and cloak and since Jonathan’s moulds for the full-scale insert hand had failed the previous day, a quick make-up job was needed to allow the modelmaker’s real hand to be used. Unfortunately, even with conical Finger Mouse extensions and a bit of plasticine, there was no disguising the fact that this was a human hand. Finally we hit upon the idea of employing forced perspective, with the small-scale puppet hand in the extreme foreground and a piece of thread tied to the chain link. With the right timing between myself on the thread and Jonathan on the hand, we were able to make it appear as if the tiny Banshee hand, in the correct scale, had grabbed the link.

Wind Roll And Print. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a wrap.

A year ago today was the final night of shooting of the main production block – on the roof of the Courtyard. The following day we held the wrap party. Of course, we hadn’t really wrapped. And we still haven’t. There is still the Banshee yet to shoot, which will take place this Thursday. Meet Neil Oseman, the director whose shoots go on so long he makes Stanley Kubrick look like Robert Rodriguez.

AJ came over this evening to do his looping – all three words of it. Well, two words and a scream. Unlike the rest of the cast, who got a nice hi-tech studio to re-record their lines in, AJ got the floor of my living room, under a sleeping bag.

Some of the Moat of Souls shots have now reached 44 layers, with another 20-odd to add tonight. They’re nearly done, but it’s a long trial-and-error process when you have to leave the shot to render overnight every time you want to see what it looks like. These are definitely my favourite effects in the film though.

My goal is to finish the moat, train and Banshee effects plus all the sound design by Christmas. This will just leave recording the score (two days plus prep), the mix (two weeks), grading (three days) and compositing of the umbilical cords and train smoke (one week).

I borrowed a mic again from good old Rural Media and have been mopping up the last of the sound effects. Today I’ve been to the Severn Valley Railway in Kidderminster to record steam train sounds. It was cold and wet and miserable but I think I’ve got some useable stuff.

I’m also working on the compositing for the Moat of Souls shots. James Parkes has finished all his stop motion and it’s now just a case of me putting it all together. My five-year-old computer does not like rendering 25 layers of bluescreen creatures, splashes and other elements. As always, it’s very satisfying to see the concept art and the script come to life and finally exist as a moving image on the screen.

This time last year we were filming in the Crystal Rooms. Which are being knocked down to build some posh flats. Ha ha.

I found out the other day that Richard Brake (Van Beuren) is in the forthcoming Bat Prequel, Batman Begins, as Joe Chill. And he’s now in Prague shooting a part in Doom. I wonder if he gets to battle the big spider-robot-brain-thing?

So. Croxley. Studio. In a garage. Carpet on the walls. Logic Audio. Bob’s your uncle. What I’m trying to say is, the looping session happened on Saturday. It look way too long but we got it all done in the end. After some technical problems eventually traced to my dodgy old hard drive, Neil Douek’s very impressive home recording suite admirably handled the job of re-recording eight pages’ worth of dialogue from Jonny, Ray, Katrina, Chris and (last as usual) Lara. This was done in a line-by-line fashion, with the actor in a little soundproof booth watching the scene on a portable TV over and over again until they got in perfect sync with the picture.

The strangest parts of this day were listening to Ray effectively whispering such phrases as “I’m so crazy about you,” in my ear, via the wonder of headphones, and Katrina doing porn grunts, which is always good for a laugh.

I think it must have been 8pm by the time we finished with the last of the actors (by which I mean Lara) and Neil very kindly worked on until 1:30am to convert the recordings into files that I could use easily when I got them back onto my edit suite.

My main goal this week has been to make the miniature train look less miniature. This has involved painting out wires, adding steam, adding foreground objects, darkening shots and generally trying to hide the thing as much as possible. Worrying about getting these shots to look okay has severely taken the edge of my relief at having got the train shoot out of the way. The clouds parted briefly yesterday when I realised that I could count on the fingers of one hand all the main tasks left to accomplish for Soul Searcher.

David Markwick is working on Dante’s birth-of-a-supervillain scene (he falls into a vat of acid/gets irradiated/injects himself with performance enhancers/gets stuck in a portal to Hell… it’s all the same) which looks very, very nice.

There is a new animator on board called Andrew Fidelis who will be using the age old medium of pencil and paper to create the ghoulish faces in the train’s smoke.

And Borderlines Film Festival is screening Soul Searcher in March. So I suppose I ought to try and finish it by then.

Yesterday was train day, strike three. And it poured with rain…. but it didn’t matter because we were indoors. It was a very strange experience to have a big roof thing over our heads and some kind of weird light (sunlight, I think they call it) shining about. I can’t count the number of times I thanked God I hadn’t gone ahead with the outdoor location. We would have been up to our knees in mud and all of the models would have been ruined.

I spent Thursday putting the finishing touches on the train. At 2:30pm, a time that will live in infamy, the complete train travelled along the rails for the first time. In the evening I decided to knock off four of the simpler shots in my dad’s garage.

At nine o’ clock in the morning (that’s right, in the morning) we began in earnest on the train shots in the youth centre hall. Aided as ever by Colin, and also by AJ and his mate Mike Staiger (he of the swift death in The Beacon‘s opening melee), we shifted around furniture, old kitchen cupboard doors, the rails and some very handy theatrical flats to create a 15 metre set. We did suffer from some derailment, particularly when the rear wagon had to push along the Mustang, and in the end we put my die-cast DeLorean inside the wagon to weigh it down and keep it from tipping over. (Back to the Future saves the day again.)

We overran (some things never change) but when we wrapped at 7:30pm I was very pleased with what we’d achieved. I cut the shots in today and although some of them will need some further work in the digital domain, a lot of them looking fantastic, particularly the ultimate demise of the vehicle.

Yay! Nothing else difficult to do on this movie! (The countdown to me regretting that statement begins NOW.)

See the stills gallery for photos of the train.

This time last year we were shooting at Campions in sub-zero temperatures. Today I broke the good news to Colin that the train shoot would be taking place INDOORS and during the DAY. He thought I was winding him up. I had an exterior location lined up, but with the weather the way it’s been lately it would have been a wash-out. The interior location is Malvern Youth Centre, so I’m breaking my post-Beacon vow to never film in Malvern again, but it’s fitting that it should be a location which was also used in the original Soul Searcher short over four years ago.

I’ve just found out that the sections of track we’ll be using are 16 feet long and can’t be cut, which means AJ and I will be taking a highly amusing walk from Barnard’s Green to Great Malvern with big long bits of metal.

Elsewhere, Scott is making some final adjustments to the computerised version of the score. In the next few days he should be able to move onto the orchestration, which will hopefully allow us to record it this side of Christmas.

“There’s something very familiar about all this.”

Today is the one year anniversary of the first day of principal photography. Never in my deepest, darkest nightmares did I imagine this time last year that come this day I would STILL be working on the film and everything would STILL be going wrong. I am aware, by the way, that it’s not bad luck that has caused all the problems we’ve had, it’s simply that I tried to do too much with too little money.

I saw another umbilical cord shot today which looks great, and I’ve dropped the Moat of Souls shots (minus creatures at present) into the film. Those gaps are slowly filling up.

“I guess if you had a straight track and a level grade, and you weren’t hauling no cars behind you, and if you got the fire real hot – I’m talking hotter than the fires of Hell – she might just make 90.”

My dad and I spent another day on the train, and it’s now pretty much finished. The smoke unit isn’t as productive as I’d like – I’m going to see if I can’t get a bigger battery for it – and I’m tempted to paint spokes on all the wheels to stop them looking like something out of the Early Learning Centre, but other than that it’s all pretty bitching.

The mould of the Banshee puppet will be cracked open tomorrow, the backgrounds for James Parkes’ stop motion shots have arrived, leaving just the creatures themselves to be shot, and David Markwick is churning out umbilical cord shots at a steady rate. I’m torn between a strange complacency that the movie is so nearly finished and an almost unbearable frustration that it’s taking so long. I can’t see how it can be finished by Christmas, which is a huge blow to me; I feel like the year’s beaten me.

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but simply for the sake of completeness I should say that I attempted to do a dialogue looping session with the principal cast on Saturday, but was defeated by my knackered Beech Box (thing that connects the mic to the camera). As Lara says, the curse continues…

“My friend and I were just doing a little model railroad.”

I spent all of yesterday working on the train, as did my dad. I did all the glueing bits of gubbins on and making the paintwork look knackered and rusty, and he did all the technical stuff like fitting the smoke unit and adding couplings to the tender. It still needs another day’s work though, which makes it seem all the crazier that we thought we’d be able to shoot it a few weeks ago.