The UK Film Council rejected Dark Side for development funding. Again.
That’s the bad news out of the way. The good news is that Chiok’s model ceiling mechanism looks great. Combined with Jonathan’s mini girders and wall panels you can immediately see the missing part of the live action set come to life. Of course there’s plenty more work to do on it before it’s ready to shoot, and the sands of time are running out.
Lau and Lou’s mini Swordsman is at an early stage, but a strong steel framework is in place and Lou has painstakingly carved a remarkably detailed scale replica of the head. Beth has made a spot-on miniature of the gramophone and skill indicator piece. When this and the mini Swordsman are positioned beneath the ceiling mechanism (or in fact above, since it’s all been built upside down) it’s great to see how the mechanism dwarves the robot.
Progress on the visual FX has been good too. Aidan and Joe from SAE have really got stuck in, while Ricardo Fearon, Andrea Caserini and Allison Moore have been contributing some great work too. Some of the puppeteer removals are extremely tricky, but everyone is rising to the challenge.
The featurette for Borderlines is almost done. It focuses on the unique challenges of the shoot, namely the puppet and the inflatable bio-suit. Watching it back, it’s not hard for me to see why people doubt my sanity.

“This all seems very familiar,” as my nemesis Biff Tannen once said. Whilst pre-production on this pilot brought with it the new experience of set building, and production had the novel extravangance of 35mm, post-production is very much in the DIY vein of Soul Searcher. I only hope it doesn’t last as long.
I’ve been gradually building up the soundtrack, so far using mostly recycled sound effects from Soul Searcher. A sound that was once Dante dragging a chain across a wooden floor works equally well as the rumble and clatter of the Swordsman’s wheel. Chris Mayall’s squeaky bathroom doorknob – once the hinge of Dante’s trunk – is now the Swordsman’s axle. Little things like a squeaky wheel breathe a surprising amount of life into the scene.
Scott’s first demo came through this evening for scene two, and did not disappoint. This too is like another coat of paint on the film – another step on the ladder that leads from a jumble of rushes to a finished scene.

Things are ticking along nicely. All the major components of the miniature are under construction and the roto and paint-out work has begun on the 2K on-line footage. Hopefully this weekend I’ll break the back of the sound design; to date I’ve only got as far as trimming the dialogue and track-laying some basic foley.
I’m delighted to announce the pilot will be musically ennobled by Scott Benzie, the man responsible for The-Best-Thing-About-Soul-Searcher TM (i.e. its score). I look forward to experiencing his orchestral maneuvres on the Dark Side.
On April Fools Day, lucky patrons of the Borderlines Film Festival in Hereford will get a sneak peek at part of the pilot and a brief glimpse behind-the-scenes, not to mention an edifying oration from Yours Truly. Those wishing to see it complete and in all its 35mm Dolby 5.1 glory will still have to wait for Sci-Fi London, however.

Yesterday I went up to Elstree to see Lau and Lou who are making a miniature Swordsman. The couple showed me some of their previous work, including an automaton representing the seven deadly sins which took the form of a Pan’s Labyrinth-esque journey into phantasmagorical underground caves.
Ian had kindly delivered the full size Swordsman, the top half of which now lounges scandalously on a sofa bed in Lau and Lou’s spare room. Since the miniature will be shot upside-down, we had to figure out certain issues of gravity and loose parts that would hang the wrong way and the give the game away.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with John Galloway and two students from the SAE Institute who will be handling some of the puppeteer paint-out work.

Post-production finally feels like it’s getting up to speed. Two students from the SAE – a college in Islington that I used to lecture at – have begun painting out puppeteers, just in low rez off-line shots for now, but the 2K scan should be done by next week, then they can really get cracking.
Meanwhile preparations are underway to build a miniature Swordsman and ceiling mechanism for shooting in late March along with the rest of the pick-ups.

The application to the UK Film Council’s Feature Film Development Fund went off yesterday, with a nice DVD of the pilot rough cut, some of Ian’s artwork, the script and the obligatory half page on “why this film should be made”, which as any reader of this blog might guess included glorification of eighties fantasy classics and a rant about CGI. This is my fourth application for development funding for Dark Side: two to Screen West Midlands and now two to the UKFC. Fourth time lucky?
Tomorrow I have to lug the rolls of camera negative across Soho again to be scanned at 2K resolution. This way the VFX can be done at the highest quality so it can be recorded back to 35mm for screenings.
I was in HMV earlier when a voice behind me said, “Hey, McFly!” I turned around, because in my head I am McFly. And I don’t mean the band. Back to the Future Part III was playing. Nuff said.

I’ve decided to shoot some pick-ups of the Swordsman, in addition to shots of the miniature ceiling mechanism, which will allow me to complete scenes two and three as originally intended. There is a deadline to work to – film festival Sci-Fi London are going to premiere the pilot, or part of it, at the start of May. In addition to the extra shooting, there’s a truckload of roto and compositing work and all the sound design and mixing to do before then. John Galloway, a cohort from the Soul Searcher days back in the Hairy Ford, is in charge of the former. On sonic duties is another SS veteran, Neil Douek, who will once again balance the Kurt Russells and tweak the volume knobs of destiny to deliver the 5.1 mix.
As you may have noticed I’m playing catch-up with the podcasts – still a couple more to go before we get to principal photography – and I’ve started work on a sparkly new Flash website. And I’m about to apply once again to the UK Film Council for development funding.

The recurring nightmare lasted until Christmas Day, when my body gave up and tried to contract the flu just to spite me. After a night or two of slightly different dreams – this time rushing to strike the set before we got kicked out of HDS – I finally recovered.
A few days before Christmas I had completed a rough cut of scene three (unsurprisingly, the last of the trio scenes which the pilot was intended to comprise). If I was editing the feature right now I’d be very pleased with the scene and more than happy to cut it into the timeline. As a pilot it’s somewhat problematic because it doesn’t have the wide establishing shots of the set and the Swordsman. However, by the skin of our teeth we did manage to cover all of scene two. I cut this yesterday and it’s not as far from working as it could be. It’s a question of what, if anything, can be done to bring this scene up to scratch, or whether I’ll have to resort to behind-the-scenes B roll and interviews to set up scene three.
Speaking of which, over the last few days I have been capturing the prodigious “making of” material which Gerard and his friends shot. In all we have amassed 21 hours of material since we started documenting the pilot in 2007, half of which covers the shoot.

I almost forgot to mention us A-Teaming the trolley. You know things are desperate when, in order to move scrap wood from your workshop to your studio, you have to build a trolley from some of that scrap wood first. Not from scratch, mind. We had a trolley already – it just wasn’t big enough and needed extending. Anyway, this was on Saturday and we dragged our new creation all the way around the outside of the building in the rain to find that the skip which we thought was there had been taken away, so then we had to wheel it all back.
And on Monday we were still clearing the last of our stuff out of the workshop when the next production moved in – not a production at all, in fact, but an art installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum. Presumably thinking I was a runner or other minion, one of their staff offered me