Lazarus Day 2

Well the festive break is nearly over. The sock fairy has visited all of the good boys and girls (I was especially good and got many pairs of shiny new socks!) much beer has been drunk, and due to general merriment and family visiting I’ve been stuck away from an internet connection for almost an entire week. I’m back now though and the shakes have almost completely subsided.

Talking about shakes, there’s a reason why a lot of TV and films gets made in California. With its depressingly predictable, continuous, glorious sunshine you just know that if you shoot some external shot’s outside one weekend, the following weekend the weather will be the same. Not so in the land called Blighty, especially in the spring. I’m sure you’ve already guessed by now that on the 19th of March, we were grabbing the last of the external scenes. If not check the shooting schedule below.



Now to be fair I’m making a little bit of a mountain out of this mole hill. All of the scene’s we had to pick up on the 19th happened an undisclosed amount of time after the scenes we had shot the previous week, so it didn’t really affect the shoot at all. It’s just that I’m stereotypically British, I like warm beer, talking about the weather, and I’m crap at tennis.

We arrived at big Steve’s house in glorious sunshine. We drank tea, chatted, made up some zombies, loaded up the first car with a sound man, cameraman Ben (Algy) the director and one finished zombie and sent them off to the woods. Different woods from the first week, as we had been plagued by chavs on a dirt bike messing with our audio. The second car was little late in leaving as we had to finish the remaining zombies.

We arrived in the woods and quickly found the first car load already busy shooting. That is shooting Algy running around on an alien planet with a poisonous atmosphere with out a re-breather! Ah! Now to be fair all it took was 1 improvised line (“good job I don’t need to wear one of these!”) to ‘fix’ this error. And it’s unlikely, but if net nerds ever cotton on to TAoSB and start discussing it in online forums… Well they’ll slay us on this one!



However we quickly discovered we had another problem. Due to splitting props and stuff between 2 cars, and generally having no dedicated props master or wardrobe person we’d forgotten to bring the body armour that Brown is supposed to be wearing in his last external scenes. DOH! One of the drivers was dispatched back to Steve’s house to get it. Now to the average lay person most sets of black body armour look identical. Which explains why 15 minutes later the driver returned with the wrong set! I was mortified, but we didn’t have time to go and get the other set so we pressed on. Flash forward a couple of months to the premier of Lazarus and guess what? To the average person most sets of black body armour look identical. The director was right, no one would notice.



While we shot my one line cameo, Sarah delved in to her make-up box to mud up Ben. Now in November of the previous year, Ben had agreed that it would be really cool to shot the last of his woodland scenes, stripped to the waste and covered in mud, Predator style. Admittedly he was drunk when he agreed this. One look at Sarah’s specially prepared tub of mud make-up, and Ben decided that he wasn’t stripping. He also asked if we could avoid getting any in his hair. There’s a lesson to be learnt here; Ben’s a big girl’s blouse! No wait that’s not a lesson. The lesson is this. If someone agrees to do something when they’re drunk, get them to sign a contract before they sober up!



With day 2 in the bag we headed back to big Steve’s house where he promptly delivered the biggest bombshell of the production…

8 Months To The Day

Okay so this actually started out as an introduction for another post, then it kind of blossomed out of control, got to big, and became it’s own little mini post. Unfortunately the introduction for the old introduction sucks. You’d better move down to the next paragraph now before it gets any worse.

So it’s been eight months to the day since I last conducted a Google search for The Adventures of Stephen Brown. Since then Beacon has actually created an official Stephen Brown/Beacon website, along with a couple of myspace pages, and posted some stuff on you tube. So let’s type in the magic words and see what happens.

the adventures of Stephen Brown

HUZZAH!!! Okay Wikipedia still takes the top slot, followed by answers.com (who the hell are they) but there they are at number 3 the official Beacon website, yee-ha! Also on the front page you get an SB Youtube video, and the beacon forums, which basically means a ton of relevant content (oh and Beacon now have contact details on their site , nice) On the downside for some reason I’ve fallen off the radar and don’t even manage to make it into the first 10 pages. I should write to Google and complain. Meh!

But you know there’s always a twist. A funny thing happens when you show some search engine savvy and use operators in your search

“the adventures of Stephen Brown”

Wikipedia still tops the bill (damn they’re eyes) but for some reason I now come up at number 2. All of the aforementioned content still makes it to the front page, so technically all is good. I guess I’m just a little more search engine friendly, what with these huge tracts of text an’ all. So come on Neil get typing!

For the record if you add blog after the adventures of Stephen Brown I come up top on both searches… but who’s going to do that? Even better if you type in any variation on Echo Black into Google then I top the charts. In fact the vibrators don’t even make it on to the front page anymore. There could be some disappointed ladies out there this Christmas.

Lazarus Day 1

Long time no post, what’s up with that? Yes I know I promised to be more regular, but even a prune juice a day couldn’t have helped with November!

An absence of staff at work, due to a delightful combination of sickness and leave, has meant that I’ve had precious few days off in the last month. Obviously, I've had an ungodly amount of stuff which I’ve had to jam into this limited time (who’d have thought it could take so long to research and write a best mans speech!) and the blog may have suffered L but it’s plain sailing from here to Christmas so let the good times roll!

On a side note I wrote this intro 2 weeks ago. Turns out I was wrong about the plain sailing, but anyway…

Back at the start of March the good times were starring to grind. While certain elements of pre-production where going swimmingly other areas… Well it’s not like you really need to confirm the cast until the morning before the first day of shooting, is it? This and some other minor hitches aside and we were off!

Bring on the shooting schedule!



Okay this isn’t the actual shooting schedule. The producers insisted that the script was broken in to two separate scripts, one for each half of the episode. The reasons for this are… Well… You know… It’s traditional, yes that’s it. It’s traditional! To be honest I can’t think of any good reason to do this, but who am I to argue with tradition. Anyway I’ve removed the original episode scene descriptors and replaced them with the relevant ones from the script posted here. Aside from that this is a straight cut and paste of the original schedule.

I arrived early with Sarah (the make-up lady) and my housemate Pete, who would be playing the ‘pivotal’ role of a dead body (not listed on the schedule, dead bodies are easy to find). We unloaded the car which was packed with costume, make-up and props; got a cup of tea, and had a mooch at the set Dan had constructed for flight control, which was nice. The boy’s got an eye for design.

Since Steve was already there we started to kit him out in Anderson’s gear. I’d forgotten how long it can take to adjust body armour and drop leg pouches/holsters to size. By the time I’d finished cinching Steve’s straps (say that fast five times!) ‘Harri’ (another Sarah) and the rest of the crew had arrived. We piled back into cars and drove to the woods.

Upon arrival at the woods we set up a little base camp. Sarah stuck a special ‘phasing’ plaster to Harri’s head (doesn't she look lovely - the muzzle is there to protect small children :-) ).



Sarah then proceeded to make Pete look nastily dead. While this was going on, the director, the camera man and Ryan (playing Mann) went off to scout for locations (nothing like a bit of pre-preparation). They returned after about 20 minutes and told us they’d shot a bunch of cool footage of Ryan running around.

I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask “But don’t you need this…” I nudged the bag containing Mann’s assault rifle “…for those shots?”

One quick impromptu rewrite later (the first of many) and we were off again. Pete’s wound looked good, a little too good. This show is supposed to be aired at lunchtime! We restrained Sarah to stop her pouring any more fake blood on Pete, and throttled back on the tomatoes. A couple more shots of Chris and Harri walking around and we were done. Back to the studio...

...to find Dickey and Page had arrived, and were struggling with body armour and the various other assorted gubbins we’d brought to drape over them. A bit of fiddling around cinching their straps and they were ready to rehearse.

I got another cup of tea and walked into the studio to catch part of the rehearsal. I immediately queried the way Page had delivered a line.

“Why are you acting all angry? You’re simply stating a very obvious, matter of fact.”
“The director told me to say it like that.”
“Ah… Okay… I’ll just be drinking my tea in the lounge.”

Clearly the director and I had very different interpretations of this scene, well the whole project really. I figured it was best to stay out of his way while he was working. The pair of us arguing about scenes wouldn’t help anybody. I returned to the lounge and Sarah took me through her make-up schedule, to make sure it was right (Sarah’s level of organisation is truly terrifying, she should be a producer!) It didn’t take long, and we started to talk about all of the cool effects we just couldn’t use in a show that had to pack a PG certificate.

Slowly, in the back of my head, wheels began to turn.