Soul Searcher: December 17th 2003

Got my credit card bill today. That was amusing.

Who’d have thought a 16-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker was in Flight of the Navigator, getting upstaged by a cardboard box with a flashing light on top? I’ve got a hankering now for other family sci fi movies of the eighties that I can only just remember. What was that one with the robot boy who wasn’t supposed to be able to tell the difference between chocolate ice cream and strawberry ice cream? Was it DARRYL? And didn’t that stand for something? And wasn’t there a bit at the end in the rain with a cheesy eighties power ballad?

But enough now. I spent most of last night doing the FX for the opening scenes – mostly just subtly playing about with the demon in Photoshop to make its movements just slightly non-human. Today I’ve been working on the ghost/solid object shots. Some of it’s quite tedious, like going through forty frames of video working out how many tenths of a pixel the camera’s moved by on each frame by trial and error. It’s times like this where I don’t feel like much has changed since I was crouched on my bedroom floor in 1995 working out the pre-roll on my old Toshiba VCR so I could edit tape to tape.

I also went to the station to see the somewhat elusive manager about filming there in January. He deferred me to their PR department in Cardiff. Hmmm.

Finally got to speak to Edd last night. Thanks to his selfless absorption of all of his expenses from the shoot, he’s now even more broke than me. He couldn’t return my phone calls because he couldn’t afford any phone credit. Ain’t filmmaking grrrrrrrrrrreat?

Soul Searcher: December 17th 2003