The time had come for the actual shoot. Having gathered a crew and found the right location, the first thing to do was to drop the equipment off. I knew the school was alarmed and guarded so the equipment would be safe there. Problem was, nobody seemed to know we were coming. The school was locked up. Disaster! So the equipment spent the first night with our Safe House keeper and valuable Driver, Philip Dowling (thanks Phil!). Undeterred, we arrived the next day to start shooting.

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Day 1

We spent a while scouting all of our set ups (which we were supposed to do the day before) and then set up for the first shot - a classroom scene with Doyle and the injured Mark. Nobody had thought to bring a slate so, for the first day, we simply wrote the shot numbers on pieces of paper. The backs of the storyboards, actually. Here’s an image of me, the director, holding up an example of our slate substitutes.

We shot some of the end during that first day too. The room was a hall in a dining area of the school. There were fuse boxes protruding from the wall that I thought would look pretty cool by torchlight. Problem was, the room wasn’t dark enough. We spent half of that day taping black plastic bin liners to darken the room and, every time we thought we had finished, we spotted another little beam of light. The darker we got the room, the more noticeable the light was. So if you look in the background of those shots, you will see our bin liners!

Simon and Rob and the make-up team had a big job doing Ben Morris, who played Mark, up for those shots. He had to have several transition stages earlier in the day but this was the biggie - a fully transformed Mark! I had done a little doodle a long time before of the sort of thing I was thinking of. I wanted it to look a bit like Mark had twisted up while zombiefying and it had shifted his features. Well Simon gave me that and more! Mark looked like he had torn half his face off in twisted convulsions. It looked hideous but fantastic. Here are the early stages of that make-up.

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Ben really managed to get a tortured portrayal out here and that’s exactly what I wanted. Although he is pursuing Doyle in the scene, I wanted Mark to be more of a victim.

So this was a showdown between Doyle and Mark. Cieran, who played Doyle, had to be really careful not to bash Ben with the torch. You can see him here measuring the distance. There was one take where he did clip him but luckily he only hit latex! I think we used that shot.

We also had some make-up on Doyle here too - a large slash on his face. This would appear in the Adult Doyle sections for continuity. We just shot it with Ben’s hand over the wound and then he pulled down. Afterwards, we fixed it so the wound was actually appearing. It’s very dark at that point in the movie but here’s what it looked like with the lights on.

The end of day one got very messy. One of the main ingredients in this mess was treacle so it took a lot of scrubbing to get the stickiness off the walls. I don’t think any of us managed to escape getting splatted in this goo. Here you can see a hand directing Noel, our cameraman, to the part of the wall that would next be splatted.

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Day 1 was pretty tough for all of us and a couple of crew members didn't make it to Day 2 as a result. I was very stressed at this point and really hoped Day 2 would go better.

 

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