The last shots required featured the Tardis. Well, this was an issue, as all three of my toy Tardis (yes, three, if there was any doubt now of my nerdy credecntiuals they're past) had disappeared in the general chaos of the foster kids arriving. So it was off for a desperate last-minute search of every toyshop in the area. Finally, I found a Tardis moneybox in a local cheapie shop, and duly purchased it.
Of course by this point I'd had to throw out the sand form the first shoot, so this was shot on a sand-covered piece of artwork which Amy had made at School (its complicated; more in a future post on this particular aspect).
The human characters... hell, this was a cock-up. Well, I'd made a mistake with the deadline for the project and ran out of time to draw my own, my backup plan of using some I'd drawn for an aborted project from about seven years back fell apart when I melted an external hard drive (no, really), so I was forced to use some stock pics I'd shot for the Steampunk project. At least the trooper looked fairly futuristic and seemed to fit the part when photoshopped into the background pics. And the little detail of the Space Invader badge on the lapel is a further note of nerdiness I suppose.
More photoshoppery for the Daleks-eye view.
And so to the making of the film; Amy had used the software programme "Monkeyjam" before, I'd played with it a little bit but ended up having to basically teach myself it in a matter of a few nights. Not easy, particularly as it kept crashing, losing work, and generally buggering up. It would have been less of an issue had I not a) cocked up the deadline, meaning I had two weeks less time to act than originally thought, and b) hadn't have started a new day job that week.
Not content with having to learn a whole new programme for editing the pics into a film, I then decided to learn to use another new programme to add the sound. An entertaining evening was spent trying to do silly voices and sound effects (I hate the sound of my voice, and the Dalek also ended up sounding like a Mysteron in weird sci-fi crossover territory). But in the end I was able to edit something together, even if it wasn't quite what I'd intended.
Deleted scenes from the cutting room floor... given the time constraints produced from using Monkeyjam, I had to chop all the aircraft scenes, though to be honest I hadn't been that happy with them anyway as they were shot on the last night in Wales, and outside the caravan so not at the beach. But there are some ideas there for a future shoot...
So to sum up then?
Well, I loved the project and the chance to try something new, working to a very tight deadline and having to improvise something on zero budget, it felt not unlike some of the projects from Uni days. I like mucking about with miniatures anyway, and love Dr Who, so it was a good combination. And it was a nice distraction from the stress of starting a new job.
On the downside? Well, its probably not what the BBC were intending when they advertised the project, it felt a tad rushed, there were several aborted shoots due to bad weather, a lot of late nights, it killed a tripod, an external hard drive and several models, and the final edit had me sitting up until 4.30 in the morning (two hours sleep before work, loved that), and it was so tight to the deadline that it was uploaded with only an hour and fifty eight minutes to spare.
Would I do it again? Hell yes. Love Daleks.
So that done, back to normal updates, we've a mass of projects from the summer to edit and upload.
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