MORE SOLIID INFORMATION : French flick films out east

Shooting the mean streets of Hong Kong and soundstages of Nanhai.

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The fast and furious French SF shoot for ‘SOLIID’ saw Team B&E filming on location in Aberdeen Harbour, Sheung Wan and Temple Street. The Temple Street scenes drew a crowd of normally blasé locals to witness leading man Seydina Balde getting accosted by local actor Andrew Ng (is any film ever shot anywhere in Hong Kong without him?!?).

We got very lucky finding an area to shoot where we could wire ourselves in to a stall holders power socket, and happily remain unaccosted by representatives of the law and the lawless.

From Jordan, we moved to Hung Hom, and a wonderful cake slice shaped old building, which we dubbed the Red House.We located some wonderful local colour to be visible on the street outside, and director F Manga outfitted an interior balcony with neon for the full Ridley Scott effect. My son Ryan worked as a PA on this leg of the shoot; that's him posing above with this great old lady we had sitting outside the door.

The fact that full 90% of the locals seemed to be blind drunk only added to the excitement. (Okay, maybe not these kids in the photo below, but pretty much everyone else...)

Up in Nanhai, the dangers facing the cast included bottled alien remains and a renanimated corpse, ably incarnated by Aussie actor Soren Robinsen (who kept the full make-up on for Halloween.)

MVP Carey Rothman designed and built a suitably spooky apartment for Soren to be discovered in.

And also dressed one of our standing apartments for a tense confrontation between stars Seydina and Sabine.

Carey also dressed the funk back street set for a scene between our heroes and some alien invaders.

It was a long few nights, but Monsieur Manga seemed happy with the footage.

It was a great experience to work with an old friend, in Seydina, and meet some new ones, in F and the rest of his team.