Chewsday

On a day that started out with us licking a lot of envelopes, today actually blossomed into quite an event.

So much so that I’m going to need to blog about it in two chunks. Shall we say the same time tomorrow?

Because, after all the fannying about with investment packages over the last couple of weeks, we finally took a day out to go chat to proper film people. In London.

Not that we completely forsook our financing responsibilities. I spent the first hour of the day chatting sales and distribution with Steven Sheil, writer and director of 2008’s deliciously disturbing family torture movie Mum & Dad.

As a recent low-budget UK horror film that generated a fair amount of notoriety, it’s an important case study to help predict the marketplace for Resurrection. Steven was very generous with his time and info. And brilliantly, it seems that he got to travel the world to dozens of festivals without ever getting a 35 mm blow-up done from his digital HD master.

Bingo. That’s £30k saved on our post-production budget straightaway. Were that every conversation was so lucrative.

So, on to Ads and Matt, two guys that work in digital FX (and thank you Dave for the introduction). Fine fellows, the pair. As well as knowing their way around the London production scene, and a bucket-load about camera technology, they are also the owners of today’s best idea. Want to get onto a whole load of film sets and see how other people run them? Sign up as Extras. Genius.

Yeah - let's see if they still want to come and play once they’ve read the screenplay.

And then on to introduce ourselves to Robbie Drake, over a well-earned pint. Robbie-the-gore is so very, very our SFX guy. At 41, he’s the same age as me, and has all the same horror touch-stones. I mean, has anyone else seen Dracula AD 1972?

Robbie has been at this since he was sixteen, and rinsed through our take-down breakdown with professional ease. Want a character to look like they’ve lost a leg? Stick them in a green sock. Want to make a bullet hole suddenly appear on a character’s head? Stick a prosthetic wound on, and then digitally remove it up to the point that the guy gets shot. Want to spray an actor with maggots? Cooked rice looks pretty realistic. But we’re still going to use real maggots.

He even offered to bring a big bag of spare body parts to scatter round the set.

All through the chat I was scribbling down the stuff he’d worked on – Night Breed, The Cottage, Centurion, Harry Brown, The Two Ronnies. The man has an absolutely glittering CV, although what finally swung it for me was when he admitted to being friends with Hammer diva Caroline Munro.

As the focus of a profound school-boy crush, I probably shouldn’t describe her as one of these 'horror touch-stones'. But you get what I mean. Nostalgic.