Lucy Bullen

(copyright 20th Century/Working Title/Big Talk)

My first ever foray into "special effects!" A key prop in the film was Alex's solar eclipse model, which falls into a puddle, with the moon absorbing the dirty puddle water and going dark, as in an eclipse. It took A LOT of experimentation to find a material that was absorbant, but wouldn't get so water-logged it would fall apart in the puddle and would also look convincingly like papier mache! It was hilarious how many meetings and demonstrations we had to have about this little paper moon! Once we'd found the winner, I then had to produce multiple identical repeats to enable plenty of takes. I also had to make different eclipse models for the rest of the Year 7 class, trying to show a range of styles, ideas and skill-levels.

One of my main jobs on the film was to create background dressing for classrooms at the school. This was a mixture of hand-drawn work by the pupils - again trying to show a wide range of personalities and abilities - and computer-made display materials by the teachers. Here is the Geography classroom

This was for the Science classroom

This was for the English Classroom/Form Room

All the English boards got a lot of screen time (copyright 20th Century/Working Title/Big Talk)

I hand drew and cut out all these cartoon descriptive words in as many styles of bubble writing as I could come up with! At the opposite end of the scale, for the Shakespeare board on the left I wrote and typed out 10 GCSE level essays. (copyright 20th Century/Working Title/Big Talk)

I made these big displays and a few notices for the school corridors. A major battle scene takes place in the corridors, so of course the graphics layout was meticulously planned to have simple and quickly repeatable things in the line of fire where they would get damaged and need to be reset for each take.... until the decision was made to shoot the fight from the opposite direction, putting these far more complicated elements right in shot! I stayed up all night making repeat skeletons and bees and had to get the whole props team gluing tin pie cases onto roman sheilds the next day (luckily, there were plenty of cherry bakewells going spare to repay them with!)

"Bee the Best" sneaking into shot. I also made several 18ft lengths of paper bunting (fun when your house is only 12ft wide!) featuring inspirational slogans - you can just about see it at the top here! (copyright 20th Century/Working Title/Big Talk)

Roman board - out of focus, but it's there!

Several scenes take place in classrooms with open work books on the desks, so we devised a topic and written work for each lesson, which I then had to write out in as many different styles as possible! I tried to keep handwriting, neatness, pens, use of colour, etc. consistant for each character in the class across all the subjects. . . Not that anyone would ever see or notice. I just like to torture myself.

Away from the classroom, I also produced these chalkboards for scenes in Tintagel. Marcus was keen that they would be very amateurish to fit in with the overall disappointment at this point in the quest - you can see the reference on the table underneath