Spent the morning down by the Wye. Why? Because it was a nice quiet location for some sound effects recording. Having produced a list of 125 sounds needed for da Beak, I enlisted the help of Chris Mayall to cross out 14 (wow, that’s really not very many) of those today. The local residents – one of whom saw the “dead gerbil” and assumed we were from Central News – looked on in disbelief as I ran around towing a cardboard box on a bit of string, and Chris chased after me with the mic. Most of the other stuff was fairly mundane – walking, running, jumping, falling over (mmmm, falling over wet grass which is probably full of dog shit) on various surfaces, trampling through undergrowth, and so forth. More of the same tomorrow, I expect, but in the mean time I need to take a close look at the budget. Only about UKP200 remains for publicity, this figure having been reduced from more like UKP700 in order to transmogrify 40% of the video dupes into DVDs. However, since the DVDs will be sold for a higher price per unit, I guess I can safely increase the total budget. Hell, without publicity, I’m just wasting my time.