I'd shown Hinako the script shortly after it was written, she had enjoyed the story and had shown the script to a few of her friends who had also expressed an interest in the project. Project. That's what it had become - before I knew it I was about to meet with her friends as potential cast members for a short film that was heading towards imminent production. It was exciting to see the faces of the characters emerge from photographs I had seen - Takaharu Kato as the samurai, Hiroaki Ohfuji as the passing by merchant, Tetsuya Iida as the Innocent bystander, Hinako Maruyama playing both female roles, and Nobuyoshi Niwa as Masanobu, the Lords adviser.

However, we still didn't have a Lord. We had come so far but were missing one key character. Then came a stroke of luck, I had contacted a private tutor based in Newport (Akira Shimazaki) hoping he would be interested in taking the role, however, due to work committments he was unable to star in the film but helped enormously. He introduced us to Toru Takamizawa, a student at the University of Wales, Newport and he came on board completing the cast.

The script was still in English language however, and so my partner (Maya Barack) spent 2 days solid working on a translation of the dialogue which was then re-translated and worked on by the cast to give it the right tones and feeling for the language spoken at the time in which it is set. Thanks to their efforts we were on the way to filming our first scene, but before that we had to get the props - this would prove somewhat difficult.

Ebay is a great resource for people selling samurai swords that fall apart almost immediately after drawing them from their sheath, I should know I bought 3 of them. After buying 5 blunted swords (with only 2 actually being of any use) it was decided pretty early on that they would not be swung furiously by any of the actors regardless of the action taking place on screen. A contact in Tokyo (Miwa Sakaguchi) was kind enough to keep us supplied with some costumes and props, while a joke shop in Cardiff was visited for the chyonmage wigs - seriously. The main costumes however, were cut, stitched and double stitched by Carol Evans (mum) who worked tirelessly to make 5 pairs of Hakama and Keikogi while also crafting sashes for which I am forever grateful.

Going back to the wigs briefly, a colleague at work devised an ingenious concept for the use of cheap bald skull cap wigs to create the illusion of the chyonmage hairstyle often worn by Samurai. With a few incisions we were able to pull the actors real hair through the skull cap and use make-up, latex and lighting effects to do our best to hide the obvious joins from skull cap to forehead. It was a difficult task to achieve which worked fine in a controlled environment such as the scenes shot in the studio, however in broad daylight is pretty obvious and an unavoidable frustration.