This filmmaking lark is becoming a blur. What did we get done last week? Right – Wednesday! Angela and I visited the House to mull over blocking and how best to dress the rooms. By “dress”, I mean “try to make it look like real people live there and not like a film crew’s invaded”.

We also met our 16-year-old Esther and ran through the short flashback scene with her. She’s brilliant and has a great grasp of the script, which is very reassuring.

Two rounds of online rehearsals took place this week, which I have to say went incredibly well. It’s almost surreal watching the script that I’ve laboured over for more than a year starting to come to life.

On the tech front, there’s the editing set-up saga. When I first got into this, I was editing on an Alienware R3 laptop using Adobe Premier. Then I picked up a Blackmagic camera, ditched Premier and moved to the excellent Davinci Resolve. Although that worked well, my Alienware struggles to handle anything fancy, and Microsoft has now declared that my machine is officially obsolete. The battery’s been dead for years, and since it couldn’t cope with the newer version of Resolve, I’ve bitten the bullet and started building a new PC. With expert guidance from Bill, I’ve ordered numerous parts, and boxes are arriving. I can’t wait to get it all set up and hopefully running Resolve like a dream, compared to the old brick I was using before.

I’ve also solved the logistics puzzle of shooting scenes with Zoom or Teams calls in them. It turns out the solution was quite simple: actors working from home, like everyone else! I did a quick shoot on Saturday to get some “prop” shots that we’ll use in the real shoots. I’m nearly ready to schedule the Zoom scenes properly now.

Oh – and I’ve successfully faked a Zoom call using the new Google Veo AI Flow or FlowState or whatever it’s bloody called, which is clever. I’ve also co-designed and ordered a couple of fake posters with the help of my arty friend, TomCatTatt.

Only one week now until our first shoot!