Tuesday June 21st

The week of pre-production had felt like the hardest work I'd done on anything like this for a long time, and then I had the advantage of not having to do my day-job. Now we were about to start filming and I was back in the office. In some ways though it felt as though nothing had changed - I was still thinking about the film all day and phoning Dan every now and again to discuss our plans. My only concern was what time we were going to finish that night.

Dan had drawn up a schedule that started with everyone arriving between 6.30 and 7.00 and finishing at 1 in the morning. By 7pm we had Mark (our producer and Pig Man), Ken (our cameraman), Gemma (our make-up artist who Dan had met the night before), Anna (our lead) and Ben (our production manager). For the role of the husband David required a fairly large make-up job before we could film any of his scenes and this was the first thing on the schedule. David was also the only person not present. When David did eventually arrive it was a huge relief, not only because it meant that we could start but also that he was able to break the tension a bit. Looking at it from the outside what we were doing was quite an odd thing - we'd gathered these people, mainly from the internet and most of whom we had only met once before, stuck them in a house and expected them to work for us for free. Dan, Mark and myself were more concerned with the ever-more-unlikely schedule than making sure everyone was comfortable and knew what they were doing so having someone come in and break the ice a bit was a huge help, which is exactly what David did. But by the time we were filming the first shot we were already an hour behind schedule.

Filming the first few scenes it became clear we'd made the right choice with Anna. One of the first things we shot involved her reacting to seeing David being killed on the TV in front of her. Except there was nothing on the TV in front of her as we were going to edit that in later. Despite this she gave us several takes of believable confusion and fear. Added to this we had Ken doing what he does best - shooting with mirrors. While the huge mirror in the lounge might seem like a nightmare to some cameramen, Ken embraced it, so much so that the whole sequence of Anna entering the room and finding the videotape was shot with her reflection on camera, which suited the mood and themes of the film perfectly.

Ken had also supplied all his own lights for the shoot and our only problem was where to put them. This proved most difficult in the hallway as most of our shots required Ken to follow Anna through the narrow space meaning any lights would be caught on camera. We got around this by having Ben stand at the top of the stairs holding a light over the scene which, apart from killing Ben's arms, worked out fine.

By the time we'd finished shooting in the living room David walked downstairs looking bruised and bleeding from various cuts on his face, confirming that we'd also made the right choice where the make-up artist was concerned, although naturally our first response was 'More blood!' We had filmed as much of the interior as we could without David and only made one major adjustment. Realising that we weren't going to have time to work out Pig Man wounding Anna we replaced it with her backing into him then running away, which ended up being a more effective scare. Luckily, Dan had found a meat cleaver at the last minute so we at least had our murder weapon.

Next we went into the bathroom to torture the now appropriately bloody David. Then, while Gemma was giving him a slit throat for the scene where Anna discovers his body, the rest of us took a break. As it turned out we didn't need to worry about filming on the longest day of the year - it was pitch black outside by this point. We were also starting to worry about Mark's housemates who'd very kindly agreed to stay out of the way for the duration of the shoot. However, we'd promised them we'd be out of the house by eleven, and by eleven we were nowhere near finished. Thankfully after shooting Anna discovering the body there was no more screaming, just the suicide scene left and we were done.

It was past midnight by the time we got outside but despite running much later than planned we were all managing to stay calm, although we were trying not to think about what time we would actually finish. Still, I was convinced the exteriors wouldn't take too long. Until we drove to the location and discovered a) builders were digging up our set and b) railway workers were working on the tracks running alongside our set. Not only did we have to find another location but all the work being done meant that any sound we recorded would be worthless. It was now one o'clock, the time we had planned to finish, but we had no choice but to carry on.

We chose a road far enough away from our original location to avoid getting the builders and their vans in shot. Unfortunately it was right under the bridge where the railway workers were doing . I don't know what they were doing but it was very loud! An old problem that had now resurfaced was finding somewhere for Anna to hide behind so she could take Pig Man by surprise. There was nothing appropriate in sight so we improvised and used Ken's car instead. This actually made the whole scene easier to film as we could position the car right underneath a streetlamp and shoot the whole thing from the same place.

We filmed Anna running without any problems and Ken proved to be an expert at running backwards whilst holding the camera. The problem came with Pig Man in that the mask prevented Mark from seeing anything other than his feet. This wasn't a problem in the long shots, but for the moment of surprise to work we needed him to walk parallel with the car. Eventually we had Dan walking behind him just out of shot. For Anna's attack we had originally planned another effect shot involving dressing a melon up as Pig Man and smashing it with the brick. In the end the performances were good enough to do without this. We used a single take of Anna leaping out from behind the car and smacking Mark in the face with the brick, miraculously without hurting him.

The next sequence proved to be the most complicated part of the film. The idea was simple enough - Anna would pick up Pig Man's cleaver and hack him to death with it. But we had no idea how to actually shoot this without hurting anyone, so we shot it in every way we could think of - close-up's of the cleaver, a shot of Anna's shadow as she hacked into Pig Man, various close-ups of Anna. The final shot was another close-up of Anna with Gemma flicking blood in her face as we filmed. It wasn't the best way to do it, but we did manage to get one rather effective looking blood splatter out of it. We also got Anna covered in blood which looked fantastic and became possibly the best shot of the film.

After filming the un-masking scene (again skipping the special effect we hadn't worked out how to do) and Anna's death (an effect shot we did managed to film that night - Mark pulled the cleaver away from Anna's head and we reversed it in editing) we had one last shot to film - a wide shot of Anna running the length of the road whilst pursued by Pig Man. As we were filming this shot the streetlamp we were using as our light source went out. It was now coming up to three in the morning and desperation and hysteria were setting in. Ken and I decided the best way to get the lamp back on was to kick it. And as we were doing so we looked up and realised that we weren't the only ones filming. There was a CCTV camera at the top of the lamppost; a CCTV camera that had seen Anna hacking up Mark's body among other things.

We managed to get the last shot and were just packing up when the police turned up. There weren't any sirens so it was pretty obvious they were just going to tell us off, but for a moment it was all a bit worrying. 'You've been seen on camera running around with a machete' said the officer, 'Not very clever now is it'. No, it wouldn't have been very clever, except for the fact that Dan had phoned the police earlier in the day and explained what we were going to be doing. Apparently the person he told had neglected to tell anyone else but as we'd done everything we could they called it a misunderstanding and, having examined the blood-soaked meat cleaver, left us to pack up.

And that was it - apart from a couple of shots that were cut and the hand coming out of Pig Man's face which could be done later, everything we had planned to shoot had been shot. We finished two hours behind schedule and got back to Dan's flat at around four. Two and a half hours later I was making my way from London to Chelmsford in an effort to get to work on time.

Wednesday June 22nd

The only major sequence we hadn't planned to film on the Tuesday evening was a short scene on a train. So we met up at Waterloo, this time with a different cameraman, James, and boarded a train. The atmosphere this time was a bit different - none of us had had much sleep and we just wanted to get the thing finished. Added to this we were filming without permission and so we had to get it done before a) we were caught or b) commuters got angry with us for taking up half the carriage. For anyone interested, if you're thinking of filming on the tube, which we were originally, it's possible to get a free permit for a crew of less than five people as long you apply about three weeks in advance. Unfortunately I discovered this a couple of days before we were due to film.

Our main problem here was that despite James owning a top-of-the-range DV camera he hadn't quite figured out how to use it yet. In the end Dan took over the camerawork and managed to figure it out. We got the shots we needed without any problems and could finally declare the shoot finished. We had about forty-five minutes of footage that had to be cut into a five-minute film, but we could worry about that later.

Saturday June 25th

The advantage of Dan working in an editing suite was that by the time I came in to edit on Saturday he had already chosen the best takes and got a rough edit down to around twenty-five minutes. All I was really there for was to have some input into the decisions required concerning which shots to use. My brother was also visiting that weekend and despite being our competition (he'd entered his own film into the same competition we were going for) was useful to have around as a fresh pair of eyes. The footage looked a lot better than expected. I knew a lot of Ken's work would look fantastic, but I was surprised by how well the train footage turned out. Also Dan had managed to film the shot of Pig Man's hand smashing through the mirror in his face and it actually looked like it might work. By the end of the day we had a very rough five-minute edit.

Monday June 27th

Although the film was effectively finished visually there were a lot of things that still needed to be fixed, mainly the sound which was fairly inconsistent. We also had to lose a couple of shots - one of Anna entering the house as it was nowhere near dark enough when we filmed it, and a lot of the Pig Man footage was shortened as much as possible as it just didn't look scary. We had to edit the soundtrack practically from scratch, especially where the exteriors were concerned as the railway workers had made most of it unusable. I was suddenly very thankful for the absence of dialogue. For most of the exteriors we laid down a background track then populated it with gasps and screams from Anna and footsteps for the Pig Man. The most difficult thing to find was the sound of the cleaver hacking into Pig Man's body as whatever we tried ended up sounding like a cheap sound effect. Unfortunately we were running out of time and in the end made some decisions that if not perfect were enough to get the story across.

Tuesday June 28th

We knew that the film had to be finished that night and that it was practically all there. As we tweaked the final few issues a thunderstorm started outside and comparisons to Frankenstein finishing his monster came to mind. But by the time we'd finished I wasn't quite sure what we'd created. Aside from my brother at the weekend, only Dan and myself had been involved in the editing process and there was no time to get a third opinion. The problem with editing is you end up watching the film so many times that it becomes almost unbearable to sit through, let alone make any further changes. There were a few things we still wanted to fix, like a couple of missing pixels on Ken's camera and the addition of music, but we at least had something we could submit to the competition. As the storm came to an end we put the finished film on tape and called it a wrap.

Sitting in a bar a couple of weeks later we finally had a chance to consider what we'd done and overall we were quite happy with it. We also totalled up how much we'd spent and it came to just under £250 which wasn't bad between two of us. Our biggest problem was lack of time; we definitely could have used another week of preparation and a couple of extra shooting nights. But all things considered we'd achieved everything we set out to achieve. We'd gone through the whole process from pre to post in just under a month, other than a couple of unnecessary scenes everything that was scripted was in the film, and the result was a fairly effective horror film. In the end that was the most important thing - that it looked and felt like a horror film with all the genre's classic themes and images present and correct. All it needed to do now was scare people.

Chris Regan