What's this? I thought we'd wrapped!

Well, it's just a little postscript really, to tell of how we got our desert shots for the very opening of episode one and for the flashbacks throughout.

In the desert

On Monday morning, Susanna, Georgie Henley, her mum Helen, and a tiny crew (eight of us) meet at Luton airport to fly to Gran Canaria. After a four hour flight, we meet our Canarian location manager and check into an enormous package holiday hotel near Playa del Ingles full of sunburnt British, Dutch and Germans.

The next morning we're up at 5.30am and head into the Maspalomas dunes. But as the sun comes up at 7 we realise we're in the wrong place - in the darkness we've wandered into a different part of the dunes to where we'd planned. We shoot for a couple of hours anyway.

The next morning we try again. It's perfect! We're in the right spot, the night-time wind has blown away all the annoying footprints in the sand, and the dawn is cloudless. Georgie sits in the sand in her red and gold scarf (another Andrea Galer costume treat) bathed in the soft red dawn light.

"We've got our desert shots very cheaply and have a stylish, interesting and very original opening for our Jane Eyre."

Triumphant, we shoot a stack of shots incredibly quickly. We wrap after an hour, head back to the hotel for breakfast, and jet back to London at lunchtime. We've got our desert shots very cheaply indeed, went nowhere near the Sahara, and have got ourselves a stylish, interesting and very original opening for our Jane Eyre.

Final reflections

I wonder how our show will go down. Certainly, those who know the book well will - if they want to - have an easy time spotting what we have left out, what we have rearranged, what we have created.

I hope that they get beyond that though, and try to look at the story with new eyes. Making an adaptation like this isn't merely about representing the book, though that is of course important.

"It's really about coming at the material with a fresh approach and entertaining as broad an audience as possible."

It's really about coming at the material with a fresh approach and entertaining in as many ways as possible as broad an audience as possible. I hope that people new to the story will enjoy it. I hope that people familiar with the story will enjoy it too, and come to relish the approach our drama takes to the material.

It's been great fun to make, I hope it's good to watch too.

I've got a summer of post-production now. Each episode will be picture-edited for two or three weeks, then music, sound, special effects, colour grading will all be added. This will take us to the end of September.

Then I take on some new challenges...