History 105

So I’ve just reviewed my last entry and I thought before carrying on with the story, wouldn’t it be fun to try and find web info on beacon, see if it’s any easier than it was almost 2 years ago. Here are the results:

“The Adventures of Stephen Brown” The name of the show – 7 hits. 2 dead links to Southampton TV, 3 hits, to a local website article dated Jan 2001, 1 hit to a channel 4 forum (a group member mentioning what they do) and a wikipedia entry, which is shiny and new. No contact details though.

“Beacon Productions” Erm the production company- 569 hits. That’s a fair few hits! But it turns out Beacon is a popular name for productions companies. Limit the search to UK sites and we cut down to 142 hits, still a lot, but a trawlable amount. None of them however belong to our Beacon Productions.

On an aside, a random crawl through the global hits (I have nothing better to do today) reveals that at least one of the 569 hits is relevant. I present niroku graphic, the website of the guy who does the CGI for “The Adventures of Stephen Brown”. Go on have a look, he’s good. Despite the fact that his site mentions the show, he didn’t show up on the ‘The Adventures of Stephen Brown’ search. The moral here, Google hates flash! For some reason Google also decided he wasn’t based in the UK, which he is. I have absolutely no idea why that happened.

So 2 years down the line Beacon still have absolutely no web presence. They are planning on doing a website at some point, and as soon as they do I’ll post a link, I owe these guys a bit, so it’s the least I can do. Meanwhile if you want to get in contact with them, drop me a line. I’ll forward any inquires to the appropriate people.

Anyway, the corkscrew! Like I said, 6 months had past since our initial email. During that time on a number of occasions John and I had managed to catch episodes of SB, so we’d built up certain preconceptions. On the day of the shoot, me, John, his girlfriend Jen and my then girlfriend Amanda piled into a car and began the short 10 mile journey into Sci-fi.

The Beacon studio is firmly planted in the middle of suburbia, and suburbia is a rabbit’s warren. Needless to say we got a little lost, after countless identical streets and cul-de-sacs we eventually found our destination. The big man’s house, Steve Launnay’s. A small 2 bedroom place with a garden full of bikes and am-dram actors. We rolled in introduced ourselves and asked for Steve, the big man enthusiastically bounded out (and he is a big man 6’3”) to meet us and explained what was going on.

Way back in 1987 a 14 year old Steve got together with a few of his friends to record a series of stories on audio cassette about ‘a boy (Stephen Brown) and his sister who found a spaceship in the nearby woods and took it on lots of adventures’ the audio stories proved popular amongst friends and family and more people offered to help. A few years down the line someone acquired a video camera and things snowballed from there. When we arrived in September 2004, they were in the process of shooting their fourth series for TV.

At this time the studio was Steve’s front room. For 5 months of the year, every Sunday (except for days with location shoots) cast and crew would arrive at his gaff, shift all of his furniture into the bedrooms, and bring in a series of ‘flats’ from the garden shed. The small suburban living room would be transformed into anything a spaceship, a cave, a small suburban living room and anything and everything in between.

So that’s kind of what we expected. A bunch of mates shooting Sci-fi in their front room, but there were things we just couldn’t see coming. Amongst the cast and crew, a couple of real actors, a professional sound man with all his own kit. A lot of people who appeared to know what they’re doing and a distinct lack of any sci-fi nerds. It turns out this wasn’t a small group of friends, but a huge (okay 50+ members) club, with a heaving social calendar. It also turned out to be quite good fun!

We did our best to integrate, helping move stuff around, making tea, and some how Amanda ends up in front of the camera when one of the extras doesn’t turn up. We chat about what we want to do and how we can help them out. Just generic back scratching stuff really. I didn’t realise it that sunny afternoon sitting in Steve’s garden, drinking tea and chatting away, but over the next 18 months my own project would dissipate as I focused firmly on ‘The Adventures of Stephen Brown’. I was arse about backwards and shooting off in totally new direction.