Action in the Kitchen
Location: Hartford, near Northwich
Bodies present: Steve Powell, Rob Spilsbury, Alex Wilkes, Chris Morgan, David Randell, Henry Burrows

The last few weeks have seen a great shake-up behind the scenes of Foiled. Howell managed to send some insults flying in the direction of certain other members of the cast who subsequently refused to continue working with him. The only solution, as Howell is never actually seen in the movie, was to move him to a less active role - Internet Publicity and Script Consultancy - and bring in a new Foil Man, the brave David Randell ("Kaufman" from The Legend Of Noisy Joe).

Today's scene involved Jimmy, Ray, Scanner and Laura meeting in the kitchen to perform some experiments on a captured alien. Because of the fact that the scene is set at night and the back-door in the kitchen has glass panels, we had to wait until after sunset (8pm) before beginning. The time proved useful for rehearsals, anyway.

Things progressed fairly smoothly, the actors ad-libbing throughout the experiment scene to quite amusing effect. Chris managed a substantial amount of "product placement", naming the make of every product he tested on the alien, and Steve seemed very reluctant to test even a drop of his beer on the creature. David took on the roles of Mr Clapperboard and Alien Wrangler for the scene.

The students stare through the window
at an alien on the window sill

Then came some action sequences, and things began to slow. The trouble with action is that you can spend ages setting up a single shot which might last less than a second in the final cut. Tonight we not only had Foil Man to contend with (featuring the all-new, improved, tough & flexible costume, constructed from survival blankets), but also an alien to wrangle (ie pull about on a piece of fishing line), a transformation sequence, and a fight between Foil Man and Jimmy.

An alien leaps onto Ray

Filming took much longer than we had expected, probably because of all the action, and watching the footage later I spotted a couple of continuity errors, but overall the evening was pretty successful. The continuity errors are going to stay in - things for viewers to spot!

Action! Jimmy wrestles with Foil Man, before Laura has a go too...