Five Doctors and Awakening HD Versions

Now available to download on my vimeo site these are the final HD versions of Five Doctors and Awakening Short Form edits.

You can find my reasonings behind the Awakening edit in my previous article.

If you have any comments or feedback on either of these please do respond to this article!

I have started work on two further stories -

• Three Doctors - but it's annoying the hell out of me
• Warriors of the Deep - this is going well and about a quarter of my way through!

Will be sure to update when there's more news to be had! :)

Awakening Short Form - UPDATED Final Edit (Probably)

Ok, so now available is the (probably) final version of my Awakening edit, now including the new titles.

You will be able to access and download it on my vimeo page or view it in the player below.

To give a brief overview of the edit of The Awakening and the decisions taken:

As this was only two 25 minute episodes we were editing down from 50 minutes. As a result it was less about restructuring the story and more about trying to move the action along a little more quickly through better editing

• First type of change - scene length reduction. A good example of where the overall scene has been reduced is at the start - the original story had some great ideas for dramatic effect at the beginning but Jane's searching for Ben is just too slow. By retaining the playing of these scenes between those of the arriving riders and some judicious editing I think we achieve a better intro.
• Second type of change - straight scene splits. In some cases we have taken some lengthier scenes and spliced them between the action of other scenes. The overall benefit of this is to take the action forward in a more pacey manner, making for a better overall story. It is worth noting that as I worked through The Awakening I noticed that within the story we already move on quite quickly from one scene to the next - for example when the Doctor and team are "arrested" outside the church they arrive over at the house pretty quickly. Where possible I have tried to address issues like this but in some cases this was unavoidable.
• Third type of change - lengthened scene splits. A good example of this is when the TARDIS is first landing. When splitting this scene for dramatic effect, there's actually a good couple of seconds that appear in both scenes ... which works quite well!
• Fourth type of change - darker interpretation. One thing I did try to do throughout was to make the protagonists seem darker. As a result I have taken some of their nicer banter out to make them more menacing.

Much of the action towards the end of the piece has been retained as it was as the pacing is pretty good. However I did have to make one edit I didn't like to use my closing titles as unfortunately Davison's words are lost into the end credit howl of the original. As a result we cut the end of the programme with Will's comment on tea sounding pretty awful. Not ideal but unavoidable with the technology available to me.



As always feedback much appreciated!

Cheers

Adam

Awakening "Short Form" Feedback

Here's the place for you to provide feedback on the short form edits of The Awakening!

You can find the latest versions at https://vimeo.com/agentpurple. As you need to sign in there to provide feedback, you can provide any comments or queries here instead!

So what have I done with The Awakening? After working on the first edits of Five Doctors I wanted to turn my attention to something which should be a little easier. The Awakening was only a 2 part story so we were starting out from a total of around 50 minutes of material. As a result my main focus was to try and make the one episode pacier and as a result have ended up producing something which comes in at just over 40 minutes. 

Much of the editing was led by removing some lingering shots as well as splicing some of the scenes to keep the action flowing. It's not the best story on the planet but to be fair I did find myself developing some affection for it as I went along ... albeit with some pretty rubbish characters!! I will also note that as I got to the end the last 10 minutes are pretty good and pacey so did not see a lot of editing!

Please note that I have simply edited the material and have not re-mixed the music soundtrack or played around with special effects.

All feedback very welcome but please do be constructive :)