Dream Sequences, One and Three
Location: Rusholme and Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester
Bodies present: Henry Burrows, Howell Parry, Nick Stocker, Rob Spilsbury, Chris Simpson

Spooky stuff today. During the film Scanner falls asleep three times, and each time he has a weird dream where he confronts the Foil Man and his fears. At first he's hesitant but as he gains in confidence he takes the opportunity to interrogate the alien and discover exactly what is going on. So dream sequence number three is one of the key scenes in the film where we finally realise not only what is happening, but also of the ultimate threat about to face the surviving students.

Foil Man Eats!

(You may be wondering, at this point, how Scanner can get this knowledge from a dream, I mean surely he would have to be pyschic or something? Well, without giving away too much of the plot here, by this time in the movie Scanner has "forged a link" with an alien...)

So, anyway, we wanted a pretty bare looking room with a table in it for the first dream sequence. It just so happened that Nick's house had a suitable room, so we filmed there initially. While Rob and I patched up Howell's costume, Nick went off to buy a pizza...

Then, in a relatively short period of time, we shot the entire sequence. Howell, in his Foil Man costume, managed to make a disgusting mess of the pizza as he tried to eat it, but we got a few good shots out of it.

Foil Man heads menacingly towards Rob's car

A change of location was required for dream sequence number three so we jumped into Rob's car and headed off to the flat of Chris Simpson, guest clapperboard operator and co-star of the Foil Productions short film "Sheep Man". To save time, Howell went "in costume"...

The journey was pretty uneventful - Howell waved to as many passers-by as he could, but people seemed disinterested, as if they saw a Foil Man being driven around Manchester every day. I was hoping to get some "freaked out" reactions on camera for the driving scenes which come later in the movie, but it just didn't happen.

This was my first time in Chris's flat, so I had no idea what the location would be like for filming. As it turned out, he had a hatchway between his kitchen and lounge - an excellent place for Foil Man to be peering through. Not in the script, totally unplanned, but it looked good and I figured that was enough.

A bound and gagged Scanner is watched over
by Foil Man in the hatchway

Chris helped Nick out with the clapperboard and the alien wrangling, so I've added him to the credits on the cast and crew page. Filming here took much longer than I'd expected, probably because there were a few crucial lines to be delivered, including Foil Man's long speech.

Foil Man looms out

Outside, the sun set. Inside, Rob was starting to lose all feeling in his legs from having to lie on his back tied to a chair for hours. One scene caused us immense problems - a small alien had to crawl up under Rob's shirt and wriggle about inside causing him great pain, but we eventually got a couple of shots that could probably be edited together and look reasonable.

Filming for today came to an end, we put Chris's flat back together and picked up a few of the pieces of foil that lay scattered around his floor, then headed off for a few drinks in the centre of Manchester, another scene successfully in the bag.