Poof! They're gone.
Ian Levine's "Downtime" re-shoots -- Whatever happened?
- Thread starter Emperor-Tiberius
- Start date
Don't get mad at Tiberius just because you're months late to the party.
That kind of name-calling is totally uncool.
I made it 12 minutes in. I admire the effort, the but result is pretty poor.
It was always gonna be. Just thought I'd share it to the forum.
Really, the story is like a poor man's 60th anniversary series. Not overtly terrible, but way too fanwanky on the wrong side.
Really, the story is like a poor man's 60th anniversary series. Not overtly terrible, but way too fanwanky on the wrong side.
I've spent some time trying to come up with a way of describing how the twelve minutes I watched made me feel...
So, twenty-five years ago I collected most of the Loose Canon reconstructions that existed at the time. I mailed off a blank video tape (or two), and a couple of weeks later it came back with a recon. (Or, in one case, the Rupert Booth fan films.)
The production felt to me like a recon, done with flash animation, then upscaled to PS5 level graphics. Everything about that felt jarring. There were moments that felt natural, and then it would go all stagey and janky.
I might have carried on, but...
I have Jean-Marc Lofficier's The nth Doctor, and I've read his long summary of The Dark Dimension several times. In summary, conceptually, it's not the worst idea in the world -- the fourth Doctor doesn't regenerate in "Logopolis," resulting in time fracturing which affects his later incarnations, especially the seventh, in very bad ways. There's an idea there that's workable.
Twelve minutes of this production, and even knowing vaguely where it was going I didn't care.
You open with the seventh Doctor dead, his body laying on the broken ground. This should be a big, dramatic moment. Nothing about the "direction" gives it the import. The TARDIS broken. The squad of SPARTAN soldiers giving the wreckage a Viking funeral was laughable.
And the SPARTANs! (Truly, I kept thinking of Halo.) Who are they? What's their problem? Why should I care?
Then, in 1999, what's going on in Totter's Lane? Who are the "scavengers"? Are they the human-shaped shadows leaping around? Who are the people who find the fourth Doctor? Who is the sinister guy with the Ed Grimly haircut, who has a Nokia phone that is also a flip phone? Why does the fourth Doctor run out of the hospital? (And the staging of that was so, so bad.)
Literally nothing gets explained in any way that was compelling enough for me to keep watching. Characters are not introduced, there's nothing to catch the viewer's interest.
I don't know if Levine was working from Adrian Rigelsford's shooting script, though I sort of assume he was. If this is the shooting script, it shows how much direction and performance matter. But it's also a really poor shooting script. It assumes too much interest on the part of the viewer in continuing. I'm a Doctor Who fan! I have interest! But this was both too damn baroque and too lackluster for even me.
There's a very good reason for that, they're just straight-up Halo characters (technically, it looks like one is an ODST). In the second shot of them, the one on the right is just a promotional cutout of the Master Chief from the Halo 3 announcement trailer. Looks like they might've used a cosplay photo or video for one of the later ones. I understand the concept of mocking up a collage/storyboard and then turning the AI loose on it to make it visually coherent with a style transfer and then animate it, but this isn't exactly a showpiece for the technology.
The Seventh Doctor is breathing awfully hard for a dead guy. The Halo assualt rifle shooting... regeneration energy/fire?... is hilarious, especially with the sound effect. I kind of want to watch the rest of this just to make fun of it, but I've got stuff to do. Maybe later.
Hey, I've not even seen it yet. Once was enough, but I might take the plunge if the serial is ever completed.
Which reminds me: This was never gonna be a serial, was it? it was meant to be a one-off TV Movie, to be sold off as a video special or something? Seems like Levine is imposing his 25-minute limitations on these things.
While I share the sentiment, this recon is actually one of his better ones surprisingly. His recons on the "new" Sixth Doctor stories are way worse, even if the stories aren't (I don't hate Gallifrey for instance, but it looks terrible).
I broadly agree with you, and indeed I would basically totally agree with you if I end up watching it. But all his recons of stories that were never made are indicative of his genuine lack of talent in producing a visual that would accentuate or indeed elevate the material. He constantly put down BF for only doing audio stories without visuals, but he doesn't really back up his claim with visuals that would sit with the canon.
Remember. He wanted the old recons to be put on a DVD for people to pay and watch!
BTW, those ARE Halo suits, and they're all from Halo Reach and Halo 3: ODST.
What's especially galling is having Graeme Harper's name plastered in these things, as if he actually directed these recons in the first place. He never did! I don't understand why Levine can't just put his own name in there as he's the director/producer of these things, clearly.
Similarly, saying that Yellow Fever was written by Robert Holmes is beyond disngenuous, and an outright lie.
Yes, a direct-to-video 80-90 minute film.
For similar reasons, Big Finish's early McGann seasons, which presented his stories as four-part serials never really sat well with me. A McGann series would not have been made that way. Big Finish was imposing a form from another time.
Because he's trying to recreate a past that never was, and in that past these people would have done that work.
I understand the impulse. I did a piece of pastiche visual art a few months ago that sprang from, "If this had existed, but it didn't, it would have looked something like this," and I was quite happy with the result, but I didn't pass it off as something that was done by someone else who had nothing to do with it.
Levine takes that impulse to an unhealthy, even deranged, end, however.
I have mixed feelings about that. While I can understand the impulse of wanting to approximate what a McGann series would have been like (presumably 42-minute episodes with a teaser and 4-5 acts, per American/Canadian TV conventions), I think it's kind of disingenuous for BF to pretend its audiobooks are just the soundtracks to TV episodes that might have been, replicating the format of the original series and even avoiding narration (so that it's often impossible to figure out what's going on just from sound effects). They should just let audiobooks be audiobooks, use the format that works best for that medium.
Yeah, I actually appreciate that the McGann BF stories, the Charley Pollard ones, did instead go back to the BBC standard, and emulated that style before transitioning into the hour-long episodes, therefore having the McGann audio era as the real, genuine segue from OldWho to NuWho.
That being said, it'd be an interesting series of Lost Stories if they ever did, say, the Leekley Bible stories or something. That'd be interesting.
Just release those fan projects for free, you schmuck!
That being said, it'd be an interesting series of Lost Stories if they ever did, say, the Leekley Bible stories or something. That'd be interesting.
The way I see, its perfectly acceptable to do these things. But, as a fan speaking from the position of moderate, I'd say its unrealistic for any institution to expectedly release your fan creations, just because you're the guy who helped salvage the lot of Who. Doesn't mean the Beeb is right in any case (quite frankly, fuck the BBC) but it does mean that Ian's overreaction in just about everything is that. And even if he's right, his bloated, often hateful remarks never help him, and he knows it, and insists on it, until its too late.
Just release those fan projects for free, you schmuck!
I think this last phrase is absolutely key. In so many ways, this describes this general attitude to, everything really. An obsession driven to truly unhealthy standards.
These are audio dramas, and audio dramas tend to not have narration. I've also been listening to the Marvel Wastelander's podcast series, and Batman: The Audio Adventures and they don't have a regular narration either. I think the Batman series does have a narrator but he pretty just sets the initial scene and then the rest goes on without him.
The audio dramas I've written for GraphicAudio have narration. GA's format is a hybrid of standard audiobook narration and full-cast audio drama, which I think captures the best of both worlds. It makes it easier to follow the action than something like the BF productions where we're expected to extrapolate it from the sound effects, and it avoids the need for clumsy expository dialogue like "Look out, that huge boulder is falling toward us!"
I prefer the straightforward dialogue/sound effects/music audio dramas, but I was listening to the occasional old Shadow and other radio shows before Big Finish came along. I've never liked being read to. I'd much rather read a book than listen to it. Much faster and more immersive, in my experience. Plus, audio drama is written for the medium, not just in terms of occasionally clumsy expository dialogue, but in the kinds of stories being told. They aren't just trying to recreate the TV series without visuals, as the occasional stories that play with the audio medium demonstrate.
But that's just my point -- it's not a binary choice between mutually exclusive options. GraphicAudio has proven you can have both -- a fully dramatized full-cast audio drama like a radio play, but with novelistic narration like an audiobook. And they've been doing it for over 20 years and have put out more than 2000 titles, so they must be doing something right.
After all, lots of old radio shows did the same thing, mixing dramatized scenes with narration. There used to be plenty of movies and TV shows with narration too, at least to an extent.
Except that a lot of the BF audios are trying to pretend they're just the soundtracks of TV episodes, so you get long stretches of sound effects where it's really hard to tell what's going on. It's senseless to eschew narration in contexts where it's a useful tool -- either to clarify action or to avoid clunky dialogue.
Offhand, the only audios I remember hearing with those long stretches of what the hell is going on are the BBC soundtracks of missing TV episodes... and those do have narration. There just sometimes isn't anything interesting to say when a silent scene drags on, and sometimes no one's sure of what actually was happening on screen at the time. Even the original scripts only help so much.
But the audio drama with no narration has nearly a century of history. It's an established form, just not a form that works for you. That doesn't make it a problem that has to be fixed.
No, I'm talking about a lot of the BF stories where there's a big action scene with lots of shooting or machine noises or running around or whatever, and if there is any explanation of what just happened, it's only in dialogue after the fact. Maybe some people are better at deciphering those audio-only clues than I am, but for me, it's often quite confusing.
I'm only pointing out that it's factually erroneous to state that audiodramas never have narration, as some earlier comments seemed to assume. Since I've actually written a number of audiodramas with narration, or had them adapted from my prose writings, I'm entitled to point out that they do, in fact, exist.
If Big Finish's audio dramas were narrated-driven, I probably wouldn't have invested in them the way I have.
Besides, there's the Companion Chronicles for that.
Besides, there's the Companion Chronicles for that.
If you haven't tried it, you can't know for sure whether you'll like it. The format I'm talking about is not like The Companion Chronicles. It's fully dramatized with full casts, music, and sound effects. It just has novelistic narration on top of that, describing the visuals, actions, and so forth in ways that dialogue and sound effects can't.
