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 32

Shoot day 01. It starts promisingly as we are warmly welcomed to the Chapel by the building's guardian, forced out of bed on a Sunday - it makes a big difference to get a smile and some kind shrugs about my French language skills rather than the tuts and sighs I probably deserved. Next, an upbeat meeting between our assembled crew, all together in one place at one time, and augmented by Lockwood, our leading man. I establish some rules: clean up after yourself; one take for each shot; never forget where you last saw me put my folder (because I will). 

As regular readers will know, the UNIVERSAL EAR set opens each day with a performance of the L'Institute Zoom company anthem, Fat Larry's Band's 'Zoom'. The French contingent take to this ritual with admirable enthusiasm, although it is a crime of culture that none of them have heard this classic before (leading lady Tuesday Betts, who arrives in the evening, puts the British familiarity with this song purely down to the ubiquity of Smooth FM in our cafes, streets, schools and prisons).

Only once the song is finished do things start going downhill. It turns out I have forgotten to bring not only the clippers to do Harley Byrne's 'do', but his entire uniform; Leray and I are dispatched in different directions across Bourges to rectify this. The guest cast begins to arrive in my absence, little suspecting the wait they will have ahead of them, since on my return our efforts to perfect the hologram effects that we require for all of today's shots prove unsatisfactory. Over the past few test weeks, we managed to get the fx to what we considered to be something like 70% perfection; today, it proved a gross overestimation.

The complexity of the script was another mis-judgement; naturally, it's pretty hard for the French cast, with mostly a limited grip on the English language (though far better than my French, as the common and disingenuous disclaimer goes), to understand the esoteric and pretentious dialogue, let alone memorize it and perform it with the required (albeit limited) level of nuance.

While the togetherness and doing-ness of the day was still very valuable (we're not here to make a movie, after all, but to make a movie), it was a huge blow to lose the time that could've been spent with these wonderful performers figuring out how to best create their characters - instead we just wound up trying to get the shots. We'll try to use these shots as a skeleton and add some flesh together in the week, where schedules allow. After months of script work worrying about words, it turned out to be light itself that we had neglected.

One nice touch: Robin-Tyrek steps up to be our smoketographer; she buys a vape machine and fluid from a local tobacconist, and it is magical to discover the smoke in our movie will be of the 'Berry' variety. It turns out that this refers to the flavour of berries rather than a specific vaping blend local to the the Berry region in which we are stationed, but sometimes authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.

In the evening, Tuesday Betts arrives via both Liverpool and Manchester airport, having turned up wrongly to the former and caused a security alert at the latter, and having eaten nary a Wagon Wheel since 11am. Believe it or not, more mischief and chaos may be just what the production needs. Niemczyk, whose lunches and dinners have fair sustained our bellies and souls since long before the Canon 814 rolled today, does not disappoint with her baked roots.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 24

Aside from the loss of Yuan's talent and personality from the production team as she leaves us for the bright lights and shimmering pavements of the Sorbonne just before lunch, it means that our Intangibles unit - the team researching light and sound for the forthcoming shoot - is mostly male. We have Queissner, of course, but she's currently hunting ambiences off-site, leaving just Leray and myself to spend the day trying to improve our hologram set-up. 

The main issue is that the ideas that go into our shambolic form of mediation should be - however shambolic - not just derived from a couple of blokes; our vision of a future virtual reality interface and environment requires greater diversity of thought, feeling and representation (cf). However, Yuan lives on in the project through the ideas she provided in our early experiments (when it was just her and me), and through the cardboard cut-out we made at the time and are using as our stand-in dummy for holographic projection tests today. Indeed, she now exists twice on set, simultaneously as cardboard and as light. Perhaps big businesses that are trying to increase workplace diversity could take a leaf out of our book: with carefully placed mirrors and projections it's possible to multiply the female presence in the office.

Still, Aleksandra Niemczyk makes not infrequent visits to ours, the altar end of the Chapel, to variously provide better ideas/improve our existing ideas/articulate our developing ideas more quickly and succinctly than we boys are able. We spend some time trying to reconstruct the set-up we had the other day, which was around 60% as effective as what we're looking for, but even that proves difficult. 

Matters are complicated by the peculiar light politics of the studio, a combination of electro-shuttered windows, analogue barn doors, an enormous multiple automated light rig overhead that functions via a haunted control panel, and some traditional floor-bound fresnels and what-have-you; not to mention the projector and various laptop displays, iPhone screens and the occasional flash of a camera. Delphine Robin-Tyrek, project assistant by name (but we need to find a job title that more fully represents her enormous and varied contribution), whispers with the haunted control panel and with the Tangibles (the team building our sets and scenery, who thus also need light), and eventually we have a functioning democracy of light in which we are able to reliably create our hologram effect.

Top: cloudy tissues. Bottom: Mondial Tissus. Later: We all fall down.

The problem now is finding the right fabric to use as a screen, so as not to draw too much attention to the machinery of the hologram (although a little clunkiness is desirable) but to make it clear enough to show up on Super 8 next to the real (meaty) actors. We have a few scraps and shapes to try, including a mosquito net that acts like a kind of column of tulle. It seems to have the best level of transparency, but while it's great for human figures it's a bit too specific for the scene in which two holographic saints stand alongside a holographic tombstone. We decide instead to try to make a screen of the material, which means a trip to 'Mondial Tissus' with our resident fabrics expert Decerle, to invest almost as much in soft netting as we spent on the entire production of A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear. Still, as I assure the team, if we can get this effect right then we will probably be head-hunted as a unit to create Star Wars X.

Pride before fall.

Back to the Chapel, and I hang the curtains with Leray. We fire the whole thing up, and it looks kind of good, but too faint, somehow. Have I blown a Flea Orchestra sized wad of Euros (around twenty-five of them) on the wrong material? The size we got is also too awkward to start tripling it up (it's already folded over double) if we want it to fill the whole screen in a wide-shot. But anyway, frustrated, I walk over to give it a try. My foot gets tangled in the low-hanging cable of the projector and the stupid thing falls off its perch, instantly breaking.

Tripped by the light, my pride hurt, the clock ticking, we decide it's best to spend the last few minutes of the day 'clearing up'. What's most frustrating is that today was the day when I'd resolved to start being a bit neater about our experiments - to slow down and consider and also to be tidy and elegant. But I considered not the low-hanging cable.

In the evening, back at the house where Leray now rooms with us, the cable of another guest's computer is strung across from the kitchen counter to the work table. Leaving the kitchen, I manage to catch my foot on it and stumble, if no damage is done to the machine (thanks, for the millionth and first time, to Apple for their quick-release magnetic power sockets). I apologize to Leray, assuming it's his computer; he tells me it's not, and he had tripped on it himself only minutes previously. Filled with pride, I repair to my room: we may not have solved the hologram issue today, I may face hundreds of Euros worth of repair bills, but it is heartening to see our young apprentice learning from my clumsy example.