Behind the Scenes – Episode 3This episode was planned way in advance of any swine flu pandemics – in fact, I originally based it on the winter flu that we had, which seems mild in comparison now! The idea was to have David trapped underground in the sewers with Weevils. I quite like filming (or setting comics) in the dark – why doesn’t anyone else?! – and I always wanted to have someone turning into a Weevil – which turned into the flu outbreak.
The sets... well, not many! Aside from the existing Hospital and Street, I reused the Street backdrop under low-light as the majority of the sewer scenes, and created a new bigger, more detailed sewer room for the Weevil/Parasite scenes...
The photos were taken on a number of days (25th April, 18th May, 20th – 21st May) so it was important to get a match in lighting. Luckily this didn’t matter so much since there was a change of scene in between, so I hope you didn’t notice considerable lighting changes.
The lighting was simply two torches – one pointed overhead and a normal flashlight – which I used different combinations of. The figure’s torch was an idea I had to ‘spice’ up the static shots of the figures when they were walking. I took apart a free pocket torch/compass thing to get the LED, and then I removed the cable supplying it power in Photoshop.
It was probably the longest episode yet, since there weren’t many scenes I could cut, nor any real reason why I should cut them since the talking scenes didn’t require much editing to it. In fact, there wasn’t as much photoshopping compared to the last episode – a brown ‘wash’ added for consistency and sewer-ness, a couple of wide angle scenes, the split-screening of Weevils (I only have one) the newsreader custom (who looks strangely like Richard Briers to me), the laptop screens, the doctor/nurse custom, the Williams/Weevil custom (head and hands), the split-screening of the bed in the hospital (I only have one bed – and the other bed was occupied by Chip, fact-fans!) editing the torch’s cable out, the SUV, the hospital door, the black eyes, a bit of airbrushing here and there, and some the water. Which, to me, is not TOO much!
The water... originally I was going to do it by either filling the set up with water, or putting the figures in a container of water with the set behind them. These proved futile so I resorted to... putting a box of water in front of the lens and shaking it!
Unfortunately my attempts at water ‘gushing’ out of a pipe were in vain as I only managed a small trickle at the most, leading me to photoshop that as well, along with extra water in some of the photos. It also ruined the set – luckily I had filmed it last of all.
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It was going to be his head or River Song's, but since her head's at a weird angle you can't really take good photos of just her head.
. Was the snakey thing The Master? 
