Falling upwards

As an instinctive curmudgeon, this week has really been trying my patience.

It’s like those Victorian fairground games with the moving layers of precariously balanced coins, just waiting to topple over into an elusive pay-out. Jake and I have spent the last few weeks feeding the machine. This week gravity is on our side and we’re reaping the rewards.

Over the course of two days we’ve essentially nailed down our two filming locations (and regular readers will appreciate the burden that has now been lifted, from my back especially). On Tuesday we got an OK-in-principle from the head-teacher of our sixth form college and met up with the Estates manager, neither of whom appear to have a problem with us decorating their school with the undead. And then today we fell in love with a forest.

The really appealing thing about the sixth form college is the enthusiasm of the head of media, Rich – a lover of all things cinema and a genuine fan of the genre. Jake and I spend weeks on end willing ourselves back into battle with the enormous production monster, and it is like catching a ray of morning sunshine when you finally meet someone that reflects a bit of that passion back at you. Somebody else gets it. Gold dust.

And then today we met two of the coolest people on planet Earth – Kate and Geoff, owners of a whole bunch of trees just outside Winchester. A forest perfect in every way. A clearing where our intrepid characters set up camp? Got one of those. A field of long grass to conceal a man-trap and a particularly ineffectual zombie? Take your pick. A whole bunch of branches to hang corpses from? Goes without saying. If Geoff can master the walk-of-the-dead over the next couple of months, we may even be able to bring you cinema’s first dread-locked zombie. His first bit of homework is to sit through the Evil Dead, which is playing there as part of the Winchester Film Festival this Friday night.

No prizes for guessing what Jake and I have planned for after-school on Friday.

And it goes on. Tomorrow we’re meeting our Continuity guy and a possible Gaffer, next week we’re off to Parliament, and we get to hook up with the effects guys again, blah blah blah.

Yeah. That’s the problem – no one wants to read about how well everything’s going. The essence of drama is rooted in conflict, after all. No doubt something will come along soon to snap the wheels off the Resurrection wagon in a more entertaining way. Until then, anybody needing to laugh at misfortune and ineptitude could do a lot worse than digging out last week’s Doctor Who on the BBC iPlayer. Bitchy.