Queasy like Sunday morning

It looks like driving the Charmed bus has officially moved from a weekday service to a seven-day-week enterprise.

With only four weeks to go till the start of the shoot, that’s probably not too surprising. What concerns me is where the next gear is going to come from if we find that this still isn’t enough time to do everything we need to do. Shaving and showering have already fallen victim to the scourge of the undead.

So, the important question is how did our camera and make-up test at the college on Friday night go? When we emerged at sun-up on Saturday morning and reflected on the night’s work, the general feeling was that it had been a night of wins and fails. For example, the successful consummation of Jake’s love-affair with his camera (win), and the discovery that we had a woefully under-powered lighting solution (fail). After a Saturday morning of bleary eyed soul searching, we’ve ironed out the issues, safe in the knowledge that a dress-rehearsal that goes off without a hitch normally spells doom for the first performance.

But the largest triumph of the evening was seeing the make-up for the first time. Robbie-the-gore came down to chat over his zombie plans and designs with our on-set make-up people Heidi and Sara, transforming Leif into his undead alter-ego en route. Regular readers would have seen Leif in blue goo during his life-casting at the beginning of last month. Four weeks of carefully managed decay later and this is what came out the other side…

And we are delighted to now have our elusive ninth (and final) cast member – Beaumont, the middle-class parent. It took a while, but it was absolutely worth the wait. Then on the same day we lost a Script Supervisor and a Gaffer. One step forward and two back, it seems.

But deliciously, the number of full-time Resurrection personnel has also swollen by 50%, with the arrival of our Production Manager, my brother Rup, a man so dedicated to the project that he’s sleeping on a futon in the Charmed office (OK, it’s the upstairs room in my flat). Designs for a testicular cuff that sends an electrical pulse every time an email comes in would be most welcome. Jolted.