No filming this week but the hunt was on for a new actor to play Morgan. When we first cast Morgan, we had maybe two or three applications at most. This time round, we’ve got 15 names in the mix – and 11 have expressed interest. This week, Angela and I held Zoom auditions with five of them. All five are solid contenders, so now comes the tricky part: choosing the one who fits best.

On Wednesday, I went to an open day of sorts at a green screen studio called Masterwork, based in Hove. I’ve been to green screen setups before, but this one is pretty special. The team there has really paid attention to detail and has some fantastic kit. Essentially, they can drop anyone standing against the green screen into a background generated by Unreal Engine. The environment they’d set up was a Roman street, and the illusion was perfect. What really impressed me was how the system synced the depth of field from the virtual camera in Unreal Engine with the aperture on the physical camera, ensuring that the virtual and real matched seamlessly. Very clever stuff.

Once again, a large part of the week was swallowed up by organisation. We’ve got the Call Centre scenes coming up later this month, so I’ve been scheduling rehearsals as well as organising props and extras. We’ve also got four scenes that are essentially Zoom calls, and I’d hoped to get those sorted before we temporarily lose Kat de Leiroos to another production. This proved awkward, but we did at least manage to lock in Kat’s scene; the other three will have to wait.

On Friday, the DOP & sound guy sent over the media from the previous shots. I’ve had a quick scan through it on my old creaking laptop and it looks fine so far, but I can’t really spend time on it until the new machine is up and running. Currently, it’s lying in bits on my dining room table, including the 8 TB internal drive I ordered last week. Bill popped round on Friday to start assembling it. Started, but didn’t finish as the internal power cables are too short! As I think I mentioned before, one of the constant themes of filmmaking seems to be pettifogging, nitpicking, fucking frustrations – and that was just the latest in a long line.

Not much happening next week as I have a few days off. Probably for the best.