Trying to think of a way to open these journal entries is always difficult, and thankfully I’ve just gotten around that. Since the last entry, a heady three lines hence, my comic genius friend Jim (not be confused with my comic genius friend Matt, in an entirely different sense of the word comic) has produced four very cool illustrations of the lead characters. As ever, it was interested to see how someone else interpreted our ideas. One of the images in particular – of bounty hunter Luca – was exactly how we had pictured the character. Others differed more from what we had imagined, but included great ideas that we would never have though of.

Hopefully the A3 storyboard frames are coming along at the moment too. I had to provide the illustrator with very comprehensive notes, which was very strange because it was like having to direct the scenes right now, without adequate preparation. I had to specify the lighting set-ups, the costumes, the blocking. It’ll be interesting to see how those turn out.

This afternoon James and I went to the art college, where Sam and Adam, a couple of performing arts students, had kindly agreed to provide a voice-over for the teaser trailer. We spent a little time going through the brief scene over and over and refining the dialogue to make it as natural as possible – an extremely useful process which we plan to do with the whole script a little further down the line, since trying to write good dialogue in isolation is a complete nightmare. Things improved greatly once James suggested we get the two actors to swap roles, and a couple of takes later we were done.

The featurette is essentially finished now – three or four minutes of material on what we’ve done so far and what we’re hoping to do, culminating in the trailer itself. We met with Alan Jones, who composed The Beacon’s excellent score, to chat with him about music for the trailer, and also for the film itself. We put to him the idea of having an orchestra perform it, which got him really fired up. Apparently I’ve shown him the light – since doing The Beacon he’s decided that film music, not pop, is the way he wants to go.

James and I were wondering why all the musicians we know in Hereford have shaved heads. We decided they must have got fed up with the headphones messing up their hair. I know I do.