Dream Sequence, The Second, Part One
Location: Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester, and a field
Bodies present: Henry Burrows, Howell Parry, Nick Stocker, Rob Spilsbury, Simon Berrey

Preparing to film in a field

If you don't count Saturday Night Zombies, then today was our first exterior shoot for Foiled. Being the expert planners that we are, all we knew was that we wanted to film part of this dream sequence in a field - but as yet we had no ideas exactly where to find a suitable one relatively close to where we'd be filming the remainder of the scene.

So, after driving around the streets of Sale in South Manchester for a while we eventually discovered a secluded football pitch surrounded by trees that seemed ideal. We parked the cars, and headed across to the far corner - Howell receiving a number of very strange looks from people out walking their dogs; not surprising as he was already wearing his Foil Man outfit.

Today we were joined by Simon Berrey as guest Clapperman; later he'd be playing the part of the radio journalist. Rob glanced through the script, realised that he only had two lines, and got straight into acting in possibly the most bizarre dream sequence of the entire film.

Scanner feels threatened by the Foil Man

As I had done some advance planning on this sequence, and I knew exactly what shots we required, the filming was finished in record time for us. We returned to the cars and left just as it was beginning to rain - a couple of minutes later and we'd have been soaked.

Our journey back up to Chorlton was very memorable, as Howell was sitting in the front of Nick's car - dressed as Foil Man. Today we saw some incredible reactions from people in other cars and by the side of the road. Either they just stopped dead still and stared, open mouthed, or they pointed with shocked expressions on their faces, or else they just laughed, waved and generally gave us all the "thumbs up"!

Finally we arrived back at Chris's flat to film the interior segment of the sequence (it's a dream, the two are pretty much interchangeable). The scene culminates in a bizarre dance between Scanner and Foil Man, where Scanner finally overcomes his fear of the metal monster.

A surreal dance

Very amusing to film, but difficult for Rob and Howell to dance in time to music that hasn't yet been composed!

The last piece of filming took place in Sale where we shot the radio sequence that will open the movie. Really we only require the audio for this, but I shot it all on the video camera so we have a visual record as well and can dub the sounds onto footage of the radio from the kitchen scenes. Our original choice of newsreader, Mike Jones, was unavailable this weekend so we roped Gary White from the Manchester band Strange into another role in Foiled! His brother Des (also from Strange) played the part of the farmer who first discovers the crashed UFO, and Simon had the role of radio journalist. This piece of filming also went surprisingly well and those of us still capable headed off into town for a well deserved beer (or two).