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 23

The day begins with a human resources shuffle, Arthur Leray joining our 'Intangibles' just as Shengwen Yuan announces she must leave us, quite suddenly, for the Sorbonne. Well, of course Niemczyk and I can't take full credit for getting Yuan into the Sorbonne after just eight days on the UNIVERSAL EAR set, but as her roomie/adopted parents we can't help but feel proud - if we'll miss the young artist's bevelled perspective on life and art, and regret we won't get to know her further just yet!

Leray steps up to the projector with courage, and is kind enough to tolerate a whole morning of me trying to explain our ever disintegrating shot-list. His suggestions as to technical solutions for the 'quicklight' floor scene - in which the movie's hero, Harley Byrne, encounters a quicksand-like historical floor fabricated from goopy holographic light - lead us back to works of Karel Zeman, and we watch a 'wonder of Zeman'-type documentary over lunch with the Tangibles. It's an odd documentary, made creepy by the video transfer's melting music and laboured shots of the genius Zeman drawing for the children who make it all worthwhile. It seems like a propaganda movie, but for what, we don't know; it's inspiring all the same (as the best propaganda movies are) and we resolve to create our quicklight tiling with a bendy lens and a fancy duvet.

We have Yuan with us for one more afternoon, so we start to test some tricky shots together; a forced perspective street scene in which the cardboard architecture is supposed to appear with a lag, like the latency of VR or video game graphics. Even with our temporarily expanded team, we are short of hands, and while we are admirably equipped with tripods and stands none of them seem to match - nor to interface directly with cardboard. On Niemczyk's return from the shops, we arm ourselves with three different types of tape and just about figure out where the buildings should stand, and what materials we'll need to fill in the gaps.

The view through our Super 8 camera (Doris's successor - she still needs a name)

Further experiments abound: torture in 2D, more hologram stuff, and piecing together the modular background for Tympanum's Godotesque opening scene. The secret subtext of today's work is never far from the surface: we are preparing Yuan to enter the Sorbonne as a sort of mole and spreader of insidious propaganda for the L'Institute Zoom way.

Yuan adding finishing touches to her signature piece of scenery...

...and visiting it in an early video test.