Doctor Who Classic - Season 18 with new VFX! (No AI) -

0:00 Intro

0:33 – The Leisure Hive

My main priority for this story was to replace the shots of the shuttles landing as the originals made no contextual sense. This required rebuilding the whole Hive from scratch in Blender because I wanted to use the peripheral structures as landing pads (for what is meant to be a popular tourist destination where shuttles come and go regularly, or at least they had done in the past).

This also provided the opportunity to present the planet’s atmosphere as something closer to how it is written – a beautiful display of airborne metals and radioactivity.

This is definitely the most 3D work I’ve done for a story so far and ate up weeks of time building and rendering!

1:24 – Meglos

The model shots of the Screens are pretty good as they are so no need for a 3D rebuild, but there’s a scene where the Gaztak ship lifts off that needed rework. I’d already had a go in my previous version by cutting out the ship from the shot, stabilising it and reinserting it, but I figured I may as well do it in Blender this time which provided an opportunity to show the ship travelling back and forth between Zolfa-Thura and Tigella.

Fun fact – the original model of the Gaztak ship only had detail added on one side, so the version I built in Blender also only has one side – so in all the shots only the starboard side is ever visible!

1:58 – Full Circle

I wasn’t originally planning a 3D build of the Starliner but I wanted to see if I could do something that improved on the existing model shots. I usually try to recreate the original models accurately but for some reason there are no existing photos of the Starliner (that I can find) and the angles it was originally shot from make it hard to make out its shape and structure.

At first it looks like a hodgepodge of geometric shapes arranged asymmetrically, but on closer inspection I think it is actually symmetrical and has a logical structure. So rather than try to follow the original I tried to come up with something that evoked the original but incorporated colours and shapes from the interior sets.

2:34 – State of Decay

Again, because I needed to redo the shots of the Arrow-class scout ship it necessitated rebuilding the whole of the Hydrax and its surrounding countryside in Blender. Which took a while but it was a lot of fun, and opened up the chance to reshoot all the establishing shots with various lighting.

As I was working on the final sequence, where the scout ship plummets to the ground, I realised that there’s a huge plot hole – or rather a lack of one! The characters are all underground, but they’re looking up at the sky as if they can see the ship rather than the ceiling of the caves, which makes no sense. And when the scout ship crashes down, there’s no indication that it’s smashed through the ground. The book offers no explanation either. So I added a composite shot of the ground cracking open when the Great One begins to emerge and POV shot from below as the ship descends.

The design of the Great One is based on a couple of illustrations of the Great Vampires from some Dr Who spin-off material (mainly an image from a comic story).

3:09 – Warriors’ Gate

Other than a couple of shots of the TARDIS there are no new 3D shots added for this story. I’d already done all the work on the pure white background for the Land of Zero Coordinates, the In-Between, the Void, or whatever it’s called (it doesn’t have an official name) for my previous version so I didn’t need to redo that thankfully. And all the model shots were pretty fantastic anyway, so I just added some bells and whistles and a bit of camera shake to the end sequence.

Interestingly, the opening of the book is completely different in the way it explains how the Privateer ended up in the Void, and describes how it got the hole in it’s hull. But since the ship had already been in the Void for “months” at the start of the story I didn’t think there was much point trying to recreate it (though it would have been fun!).

3:37 – The Keeper of Traken

The architecture of the Traken capitol is a mixture of Neoclassical and Art Nouveau, taken from a variety of free assets, with a bit of Elvish thrown in. And yes, that’s the Sagrada Familiar at the top of the hill (well, bits of it!).

Most of the composite effects are from my previous version but I spruced up the Master’s ‘regeneration’ a little.

4:19 – Logopolis

Again, other than a brief establishing shot of the TARDIS, there was no need for any additional 3D work. The Special Edition already has some excellent new effects. I did, however, add a bit of grain to the shots of Logopolis as many of the CG shots look a bit too crisp for the era which can be jarring.
You might notice I added a golden glow to the regeneration, and while this may evoke the 2005 series it’s actually more a nod to the effect I used in Robot which originated from a description in the novelisation of Planet of Spiders which describes a golden glow.

Watch the Doctor Who: Classic channel! Travel in the TARDIS with full episodes dating back to the Doctor’s first incarnation on SloppBoxx.Com.

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