Production Problems!

Visual effects for this story were limited to whatever electronic resources we had for post production and editing. However, this didn’t stop Andrew having an ambitious idea in his half of the script, namely a production note next to a section of dialogue which read, ‘Device explodes in Rani’s hand’. How he imagined we could have achieved this without giving my sister third degree burns I will never know, but he obviously thought that pyrotechnics were within the scope of our modest production. In the end, we rather lamely had Paula drop the gadget in question (actually a key ring which played sound effects) on the ground and then cry, ‘What? That Doctor – I’ll kill him!’ As you have probably deduced already, as ‘director’ of The Tamaras Crisis I was no budding Steven Speilberg. The script also called for various other electronic effects, namely a force field and a laser gun. The force field was created using an electronic tool for enhancing the picture quality, but we found that if we set it half way across the picture then the difference in quality between the two halves was enough to suggest some sort of energy barrier. The laser gun effect was achieved rather boringly by momentarily switching the picture to ‘negative’ as the gun was fired, accompanied by a suitable sound effect.

One of the less *ahem* professional aspects of making this story was the fact that we forgot to recorded a couple of scenes, one of which was crucial to the plot. We managed to create some of the missing scenes by some further hastily organised shooting with the TARDIS prop in my mum’s back garden, and by filming the scenes close-up on the TARDIS doors we ensured that any poor fool who happened to be both watching the story and paying attention wouldn’t notice that it was in a different location. I’m not quite sure why we went to so much effort to achieve this illusion as we made some awful continuity blunders elsewhere in the story, namely filming various scenes with the TARDIS in the wrong location. There was also a scene in the TARDIS control room that we neglected to record in our original allocated filming time, so this was cobbled together from a couple of stills of the console (as the scene was a ‘radio’ conversation between one of the native Tamarans and a Time Lord whose voice emanated from a speaker on the console), and some previously used close-up shots of the Tamaran with new dialogue dubbed over the top.

Unfortunately, one of the most important scenes in the entire story which explained how Ian Lethbridge-Stewart escaped strangulation by one of the androids at the climax of the first episode was also forgotten. This time we had no way of either reusing any existing footage or shooting any more, and it remains the most confusing aspect of the story. If you were to concentrate fully on what’s going on when watching The Tamaras Crisis, it’s not that difficult to deduce how and why Ian escapes the situation, but as it’s not that easy to follow the unfolding story most of the time, the missing scene would have made much more sense.

Aside from our major blunder with the cliff hanger reprisal at the start of part two, the cliff hanger itself is one of the scenes I’m most proud of within the story. It was heavily influenced by the end of the second episode of The Two Doctors where Peri falls over and Shockeye leans menacingly over her as the end title music crashes in, but nevertheless I was very pleased with our own version, and in particular a small scene just prior to this where we see the android’s eye-view as he creeps out from behind a tree and stumbles menacingly towards an unsuspecting Ian, accompanied by some particularly apt incidental music courtesy of Paddy Kingsland.

Next Episode: Cast and Crew!