Location: Manchester
Bodies present: Alex Dimond, Steve Powell, Rob Spilsbury, Lis Dimond, Darren Wilkes, Henry Burrows, Howell Parry and Nick Stocker

The first day of shooting on Foiled itself finally arrived! Cast and crew assembled together at the secret location in a house somewhere in Manchester to film the first of the bedroom scenes (a completely different house to where we'll be filming other rooms). This was also in fact the first time everyone involved in the scene had been in the same place at the same time. Tonight's scenes included Alex (Laura), Steve (Jimmy), Rob (Scanner), Lis (Helen) and Darren (Steve).

The first hour we spent preparing the room for the shoot. The main challenge was that all the indoor scenes take place at night and the sun was blazing in through the window in a not-very-night-like fashion. So, thanks to Howell, out came the black card and sellotape. Nick and Howell got to work covering the windows while the actors stood around attempting to do a bit of last minute revision of their lines.

Covering the windows

Rob and Steve rehearse

Filming got underway at 7.30pm, starting with scene 11. Apart from Steve having trouble with his lines, which is understandable as this was his first experience of being in front of a camera, things went fairly smoothly.

Until, that is, Darren's pivotal scene. We lost count of the number of takes but it was into double figures. Every time he got to the line "Laura gave me a back-door key" everyone in the room would just crack up laughing for no reason whatsoever, myself included! We got there in the end, and finally called a halt at about 1am - five scenes (about 5 or 6 minutes of edited material...) in the bag. Everyone was pretty tired by this time, so we all vanished quickly into the night.

We discovered later in the week that the residents of the house we'd been filming in were a bit freaked the next day to discover the blacked-out windows we'd forgotten to clear up - oops! There was also the added complication that Nick was due to move into that same room in a few weeks time so we'd have to complete the remaining scenes there before its contents changed irreversibly...