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Over to Jon:
In the summer of 1995, as the epic-length Time Rift shoot had finally concluded, I got the idea of shooting a little prequel, to give us a glimpse of Ray's life before the story started. The idea was to show what Ray had been up to in 2165 before the time rift grabbed her -- glimpses of her before the Daleks came, and her final mission.
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Fight Or Fly was an attempt at a different sort of style -- something much more image-based and fluid than the dialogue-heavy, often static Time Rift. Unfortunately, it was hampered by not having much meat to it, and by the haphazard casualness of Lemming production and planning in those days. For which I only have myself to blame. (We're better now. Honest.)
The story was shot over two days, both of which were abruptly curtailed due to dodgy equipment and batteries which wouldn't hold a charge. On the first day, I was behind the camera for scenes of Ray's squad of resistance fighters. Incidentally, the squad included Ben Steele and my childhood friend Adam Korengold, both of whom died horribly as Navy men in the opening moments of Time Rift. (How did we justify that? The same way as Ben's other appearances as an extra in Time Rift -- Dalek duplicates. :-) ).
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Other roles in the squad were taken by my cousin David Woodworth, college friend Lyn Cox, my then-girlfriend Kris Kramer, and Cary Gordon in his first on-camera appearance. Greg McElhatton, as part of his continuing quest to maintain deniability, played a trooper wearing a gasmask. We also had a friend of Adam's who would probably wish to remain nameless (we hope so, because none of us can remember her name, though we think it might have been Julie), who showed up "dressed for comfort" in this post-apocalyptic setting, and whose acting ability proved astonishingly poor even by Lemming standards. Buffy the Dalek Killer, as we christened her, is almost entirely absent from the final edit.
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The second day began with shots featuring Amy and Eric Gordon (Cary's brother) in the days before the Daleks came, and then moved to our main location -- the Rockville Mall, which was in the middle of being demolished. Here we shot scenes of Ray being pursued by robotised Dalek troopers, including duplicates of her friends -- Kris, David, Ben, Eric, and (as a last-minute stand-in) an unshaven, mirrorshaded me. (We didn't even bother trying to rationalize that -- we were just short on people.) Cary Gordon manned the camera.
It was on this location that we had our best-ever run-in with the police -- we had permission from the site owners to shoot there (at our own risk), but a passing police officer saw us on the site with what looked like guns... Cue the arrival of three police cars, and an officer shouting at us through a loudspeaker -- not to put the guns down, but to put the camera down. Then the guns. I guess they'd learned from Rodney King after all. Bad boys bad boys, what'cha gonna do when they come for you...
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While all of the scripted scenes were shot on both days, many of the shots and angles within the scenes were abandoned due to time constraints, and the final effects shots (of Ray leaping into the rift) were lost due to flat batteries and lack of time. A remount was out of the question, due to the abrupt lack of a building on which to shoot it -- and even more so because Amy was going back to university. Without an ending, without an actress, and with priority having to be given to getting Time Rift itself ready for its November premiere, Fight Or Fly was shelved... or rather, shoeboxed, since that's where I stored the tapes.
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Flash-forward several years, to after I'd fled the country -- Cary Gordon got ahold of the raw footage and decided to cut it together, to the piece of music called Fight Or Fly from Neil's Time Rift soundtrack. When Kate and I returned for a visit in the summer of 2000, he played us a rough-cut -- and we realized that by a coincidence, the video would sync up rather more dramatically with the first part of the "Eternal Warrior Suite" which Darrin Snider and Neil had added to the soundtrack as a bonus cut. Over the next year, Cary worked on a final cut, and managed to construct an effects-heavy ending from the footage we had... and did, in my eyes at least, a pretty bloody impressive job salvaging it.
Fight Or Fly -- and its blooper reel -- finally premiered after Timeless at Gallifrey 2002. In the grand tradition of this production, though, there still had to be one more crisis -- the tape was inadvertently left in the convention organizer's room, and he'd left for the day... so the premiere had to be delayed by half an hour while we tracked it down.
