So stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention!

Wow OK, firstly a brief apology cum explanation for the silence on these virtual pages for the past three or four weeks. As you may have gathered last time I wrote here my brother Chris and I were about to start shooting our most ambitious short film project to date, “Hallo Panda” an unromantic comedy about a man who has to wank off a talking bear which is kindly being funded by Film Four and the Film Council.

Shortly after the funders gave us the green light to go ahead with this, frankly, ridiculous piece of nonsense I was asked by one PR department or another if I’d be happy to do a blog on the production process. Glibly I agreed and shortly afterwards Cath and Jess asked if I’d be happy to extend my usual on-the-road Mobile Cinema blog into a more permanent virtual document of my life and the films that colour it. Again I was happy to agree, hoping that I’d easily be able to combine both ventures into one uberblog that told anyone who was in anyway interested everything that they might be interested in.

Little did I realise that before the film even begun shooting it would require so much of time and energy that I wouldn’t even be able to turn my computer on, let alone write down the sorry truth that I didn’t have time to write down even half of what had happened that day.

That sounds like an exaggeration but take this as an example. Friday, two days before the shoot started in a ware house in Bethnal Green, I was up at six to get down to Crystal Palace to take our brand-new-last-minute-into-the-breach first AD on a quick recce of the locations we were using as our pretend zoo. We then rattled down the Victoria loop to Battersea Park for a conversation with the council film department about our night shoot. Then, with our making-of documentary cameraman Alex Mayover (who is also the inspiration behind one of the main characters Dr.Graeme Mayover) I crawled across the bus and train network to Wandsworth where Chris had spent the morning discovering that the tilt and shift lenses we’d just spent a grand on didn’t fit with the Varicam.

The three of us then drove to Shepperton with a spare animatronic panda that we’d borrowed from SFX company Asylum. Arriving late and sweaty we met Jess Thomas our stills photographer and watched in delighted amazement as our panda performer Peter Elliott got stapled into the real panda costume so that we could shoot both erotic panda posters and some hard core panda pornograph. For this Chris duly dressed up in the spare costume and got mounted by Peter whilst I circled around with Alex’s PD150 shouting encouraging expressions like “That’s right, give it to her!”. I imagine this is exactly what Attenborough does when filming his nature stuff.

Then we drove back home and started work editing Jess’ photographs – changing backgrounds, adding graphics and generally doing what we could to give ourselves a diverse range of rude posters for the bear to enjoy. We needed these for first thing Sunday morning so we had no choice but to keep working until long after six o’clock ticked passed and I’d been awake for twenty-four hours straight.

I had exactly two and a hours sleep and was then on a train to Kings Cross where I met our brilliant Art Director Victoria Burnett and a guy called Gordon who owns an A1 printer. He was, it seemed, the only man in London who could get the posters down for us by Sunday.

Having handed the files over to Gordon I went with Vic and her sat-nav system to Bethnal Green where I spent the rest of the day helping to paint the set and nailing duvets to the front door in the hopes that I could deaden the sound of the traffic from the road outside. At the time this seemed rather pathetic but I’m glad to admit that in the end it was surprisingly effective and is a good tip if you ever need to sound proof a ware house.

I left the set at about 9pm and got home by about half past ten, was in bed by half twelve and in Chris’ car heading down to Uxbridge by five the next morning. By the time I was heading towards the set for the second day I had slept for nine out of the past seventy-two hours. I lost half a stone in the first five days.

All of which seems a bit excessive really doesn’t it, especially as, unlike Keifer Sutherland, I don’t get the kudos of having saved the world from international terrorism three times over. I just get a film about a grumpy bear.

Anyway, I probably will try and colour in the missing days just because a lot of what happened on the shoot was brilliant, funny, painful, beautiful and, at times, rather moving and poetic. And that was just behind the camera. However, such picturesque revelations will have to wait because we are scheduled for a screening of the first rough cut with Film Four, the Film Council and the Bureau on the 12th… that’s one week away, and I’m still only halfway through what seems to be a constantly expanding film (currently clocking in at twenty-minutes long…)

The fun has only just begun…