UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 36

We spend the day in the house that Jacques built - the Palais Jacques Coeur, which France's richest man commissioned and had erected just in time for a brief tour before he was trialled and exiled. Well, the real thing doesn't have much colour these days, but Niemczyk and team's replica is bright and warm - it's only a shame it too will be drained by the black and white film stock. 

Still, it's a pleasure to shoot shot after shot against more or less the same background, with just small re-arrangements to place us further along a corridor, or more intensely menaced by quite-possibly-sentient statues (and stained glass window). By the end of the day, my brain is spinning and I struggle to string a sentence together - perhaps the underlying structure of the building, or the pattern of the wallpaper, is indeed cursed, with the curse to be replicated wherever those structures are re-composed.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 34

Worship the sun, and invoke the wrath of the rain. Well, that might be utter rubbish, but the project is certainly suffering from a severe case of hubris after yesterday's glowing successes, as today the crew arrives drenched by an 8.57am downpour. More seriously, this morning's guest actor slips on the way to the studio and, after a cup of sweet tea and the reassuring gazes of half-a-dozen medically incompetent filmmakers, returns home to rest it off: she will return tomorrow only if she's feeling much better.

But after that, the rain seems to have quenched its thirst for misery and misfortune, and instead becomes a pleasant background to our day's work, cocooning us in the studio and make the team feel a bit better about a day with the shutters mostly down.

Lockwood even begins to hibernate, after our first shot of the day - in which Harley Byrne is trapped in a tomb in the foetal position and believes himself on the brink of death - runs without a hitch. He's in a difficult place at the moment (emotionally rather than geographically - he's quite charmed by Bourges) and this moment seems important to him; we leave it as long as we can before removing him from his tomb so we can strike the set and set up the 'Bourges streets' scene. A respectful nod, for that first shot, should also be directed at intern Arthur Leray: on every shoot, there seems to be one person who gets roped into playing 'unidentifiable body parts' - yesterday he was a shoulder in a Manchester postal workers social club, and for today's opening shot a holographic saint's hand.

The 'Bourges street' shot takes up a serious wedge of the day which, as we reflect, could be considered somewhat daft, seeing as how the street itself is just around the corner but instead we've flown two artists and two actors across Europe to shoot it in shoddy cardboard replica in a studio five minute's walk away. But that's sort of the point, somehow. And Niemczyk's art and draughtspersonship, and ex-intern Yuan's legacy Palais Jacques Coeur replica, conjure a certain kind of magic in the studio when the whole wonky perspective shot is put into place.

Leray and soundie Queissner (who is stranded on set amidst mainly silent scenes today) team up to set-wrangle a simple close-up that just begged for a little complication. We add a row of houses, a moon, a reflector and some authentic Berry fog to the scene, and I only regret we didn't add any foliage. 

The city that Niemczyk built.

After that, it's back to trying to create a floor made of liquid hologram - or quicklight. It's an athletic feat, since working with a projector, a Super 8 camera with no monitor, and a hand-held vase-as-wonky-lens actually involves building up a sweat on this chilly Bourges afternoon. Lockwood, too, is pushed to his limits as he must replicate fighting for his life while sinking through a cross between quicksand, liquid light, and malevolent, dissolving floor tiles, no doubt dreaming of a warm, comfortable tomb in which to sleep once this trial is over.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 21

We lived the movie twice today. This morning, following a ‘show-and-tell’ of our respective photo tours of last week’s visit to the Palais Jacques Coeur - each photo set being almost identical since we walked the same route and were essentially on the look out for tympanums, cheeky sculptures and fancy colours - Yuan and I sat down with our new sound recordist Nina Quiessner in order to create a foley list by combing the script for sonic potential. Items such as ‘howling landscape of despair’, ‘awkward silence’ (“we should at least consider it”) and various thrums and thuds prove it a rich hunting ground.

In the afternoon, Niemczyk’s Tangibles squad take a break from rebuilding the city out of cardboard in order to step into the limelight, 'volunteering' to take starring roles as we video an entire script-reading of the movie. One of the key aims of this exercise is to physicalise the dead leaves of the screenplay to get its rather wordy thematic and visual potential out in the air (particularly important since the words are tough enough for a native English speaker to get their head around, let alone our Polish-French-Chinese-German crew).

The 'Curse' plot in a nutshell.

The women (for everyone in the studio except for me is one) have fresh-toasted printouts of the screenplay, while I work from the latest shotlist; the inconsistencies between the two soon lead us into chaos. We also run out of readers, or become confused as to whether we have enough people around to see the show through, since the story contains multiple cross-identities and layers of disguise and even physical properties (some characters are made of light, or metal, or flesh, or glass; at least one is history disguised as flesh disguised as stone).

The endeavour becomes not so much about carefully staging the shots so that I can cheat by pre-editing the finished movie, as about just getting through the dummy-shoot: we rush on to the end without even stopping the DV camera between shots; a cruel parody of next week’s proper shoot when we’ll likewise allow just one take per shot but will urgently stop the camera as soon as or even before each character finishes speaking, such is the premium on the Super 8 film stock through which we’ll be burning.

Afterwards, thankfully, the crew claim to have a better understanding of the potential movie. There’s nothing like a shared perilous experience to tune folks in to the precise frequency of their situation.

At our digs, where Niemczyk and I are currently holed up with Yuan and Bandits-Mages associates David Legrand and Julien Record and an artist called Pierre, a partial electrical outage has caused us to huddle together in the kitchen around a warm circle of Wi-Fi, when otherwise we might have kept to our rooms. With only wine and eco-detergent and brief flickers of Facebook to sustain this awkward pack of strays, who knows what frequencies we might tune into or into which layered personae we might lapse. If I don’t tweet by tomorrow noon, please send somebody to shoot this damned movie for us, since we will be lost.

The 'Curse' plot in a different nutshell.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 16

Damien Chaillou hooks us up with the appropriate adaptor so we can begin the day by connecting our hefty early-noughties digital camera to a far more contemporary projector, enabling us to get started on our experiments with holographics.

We already have a Yuan-shaped cardboard cut-out, so we channel her image from one camera, through the projector, and on to her 2D avatar; it works quite nicely, but the cardboard is somehow a bit too clunky (if that's possible) so we proceed to work with various alternative materials and lighting set-ups to get the interactive, hand-waving (and peace-sign wielding) Yuan that we know and admire appropriately videoported from one corner of the studio to another. Veering dangerously close to the uncanny valley, we pause for lunch (and for me to go and get my five locally-crafted stitches removed by a friendly nurse) and concentrate, after lunch, on building tangible scenery and props. On the topic of obsolescent hardware and connector conspiracy, our coffee machine gives up the ghost mid-afternoon, the water failing to connect with the coffee grinds.

Monkey with cable issues.

Chaillou and I have spent some hours, over the past couple of days, trying to capture mini-DV footage via a succession of programs and computers. Each time, a couple of dropped frames bring the whole process to a halt. The computers want everything or they want nothing - a single missing frame is cause enough for a melodramatic refusal to continue. We sense our absurd quest for total documentation reflected in the process and product of outdated equipments in ways that aren't so immediately obvious in newer tech that has not yet ripened. Slowing down to follow the signal and lovingly press buttons with functions that today you'd just gesture at is a rewarding way to keep focussed on our aims. At least it is so long as the footage, cursed like our characters to be trapped in obscurity, is pretty much second-rate and no big loss.

There's nothing for it but to get back to real space and air, so we take a field trip to the sturdy Palais Jacques Coeur, a key location of The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, to take sketches and photographs for its virtual reconstruction (in cardboard). Like the cathedral, the house that Jacques built (but barely lived in before he was nabbed by the gendarmerie) is thick with sculptural reliefs (if we couldn't find any that were quite as pervy as the cathedral boasts), and as you might guess from the title of the forthcoming UNIVERSAL EAR episode, they play an important part in the tale.

It's a beautiful, winding house, but it feels a shame to be ushered through such a direct route when it promises a warren of secret passages, alternative escape-routes and time-proof hidey nooks. All the same, we identify some find shapes and colours to steal, and I'm impressed to catch young interns Decerle and Delevacq defacing the visitor book with UNIVERSAL EAR imagery before we leave. You can't go wrong with paper and pen.

Studying the tympanae(?)

Jacques Coeur and his emblematic heart. It's a HEART.

Yuan having a moment by a key Curse location.

More bloody hearts.

Inspiration for hats...

...and for interns.

Back at the studio, the unreal thing.