Scenes From The Subtle Knife Already Filming

I'm in Oxford, England, in case you didn't know - the city of dreaming spires. I was born here - I'm town, not gown.

As a result of living in such a photogenic city, it's often hard to avoid filming. Catering trucks block back streets, massive lighting arrays poke up amongst the colleges. Recently, of course, we've been host to the filming of The Golden Compass, the movie adaptation of book one in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

Everybody I know has seen the filming, or at least the effects of the filming. Some people know what it is they are seeing - can put the images into context because they know the books very well. That's why I trust all of the reports I'm receiving, even though I've not seen this with my own two eyes.

The big news is, not only is The Golden Compass filming here currently, so is The Subtle Knife, the second book in the series. Or at the very least some scenes from The Subtle Knife.

Now, there might have been some rejigging, where scenes from book two have made their way into film one, or they might simply be catching some film-two footage while they're here, for cost reasons, but the fact remains, some of the scenes that have been filmed clearly take place in the modern, contemporary Oxford of Knife, not the other-world 'Lyra's Oxford' of Compass.

So, are we to assume the sequel has been greenlit and is already underway with the same team? It certainly looks like the most likely answer.

[EDIT: It is now clear how the two worlds - their Oxford and ours - are worked in the film. The same extras are seen in each world, but dressed differently. Of course, this is confusing - several plot twists won't make sense if we are to suppose every world has it's own version of every person, but the scenes have been shot, and they have been shot this way.

Some of the filming has been of a cat - Moxie? - jumping through a portal between the worlds. I believe this absolutely confirms, without a doubt, that material from The Subtle Knife has been filmed already]