Soul Searcher: November 20th 2003

It’s 5:53pm and about an hour ago we wrapped,,, for the second time today, Last night we went to Westons again to shoot the conclusion of a chase sequence featuring Lara Croft/Greenway running about shooting things. Simon Wyndham came along to provide his unique brand of ultra-smooth Glidecam work, but there was a bit of a panic at lunchtime when we thought everything he’d shot was slightly out of focus. It turned out that only the last couple of shots were a little dodgy and they’re pretty fast moving anyway.

Towards the end of the night we shot Luca, Joe and Gary legging it away from some vats which were supposedly bound for explosion. This involved them running down a muddy bank and diving onto a skanky old mattress. This they did a good three or four times. On the last take Lara tripped and went flying. Like a true professional, as everyone rushed to help her up (well, some people did – I believe I stood around like a nonce) her first words were, “Did we get the take?” This Chris and Ray found extremely funny and all three of them had the giggles for the rest of the night.

Edd made a camero appearance as Distillery Worker no. 2, which I think he pretty much hated, but I thought it was pretty funny. We got back to Hereford at about 5am, at which point I took a quick bath then had to sit down and work out what order to shoot all the nightclub stuff in (now it had been reduced from three long days to two short ones) and how to light it. I gave up at just after 7am, went to bed for 25 minutes then got up to go to the Crystal Rooms and the shoot the fecking stuff.

Although I no longer felt tired, I clearly was since the plan of shooting double quick, possibly even employing two units with Simon shooting martial arts on one side of the club and me shooting drama on the other, went swiftly out the window. Well, slowly out the window. Nothing moved swiftly today. Pretty much no extras turned up, and the demon make-up took longer that expected, but this was good because it gave us plenty of time to shoot the scene’s hugely important closing sequence. In fact, by the time we were done with that we had only about two hours left to shoot the demons, who thanks to the two Nickys and Becka looked fantastic.

It was weird to wrap at 5pm. Scratch that, very weird.

Soul Searcher: November 20th 2003