Three Years Before the
by Jonathan Blum

The text of this article originally appeared in the Fall 1996 issue
of the Friends of Doctor Who newsletter

Thanks to my Doctor Who fan video, "Time Rift", for the past three years I've been living a life straight out of a Hollywood movie.

Okay, so the movie in question is "Ed Wood", but hey...

It all started in early 1993, when a bunch of us at a meeting of the Baltimore-area Who fan club, The Leisure Hive, decided to do a fan-made Who story, just because we thought it would be fun. We'd recently shot a clip for Maryland Public Television's amateur Who video contest in which I'd played the seventh Doctor, and I thought it would be fun to try the role again. At the time we were hoping that we could make it available before the BBC showed the new Doctor Who TV movie, the 30th-anniversary special "The Dark Dimension", that upcoming fall.

Over time, though, "Time Rift" grew into a full-length four-part story, starring me as the Seventh Doctor and AC Chapin as Ace, featuring UNIT USA in Washington DC, with an original musical score and computer-generated special effects. While almost all the shooting was finished within a year and a half, the final few days of shooting and the post-production work dragged on and on. We finally started shipping the completed story to people three full years after that first planning meeting.

And we still got our story out before the official Doctor Who movie, by a couple of months.

THE CAST AND CREW

The main perpetrators of this project were me, AC Chapin, and Amy Steele. I would direct and play the Doctor; AC (an incredibly talented fanfic writer) would play Ace, and Amy would handle props and costumes as well as playing Ray, a cybernetic Dalek Killer from the year 2165. Together with crewmembers Ben Steele (Amy's brother), Kris Kramer, Kevin Cherry, and Vern Roseman, we formed the nucleus of our production team.

We gathered the rest of our cast and crew from a variety of places--mostly from the Washington DC and Baltimore Who clubs. Itzy Friedman was our "ringer" -- a retired professional actor (and my cousin), who took the role of Dr. Black when another actor was unable to continue. By contrast, Marsha Twitty had never acted before she took the role of General Kramer, but she turned in a stunning performance which surprised even her.

The key to pulling off a fan video is to make all the contacts you can, both in and out of fandom. If you volunteer at your local public-access cable station, you'll run across all sorts of talented people in search of interesting projects. And there are lots of fans out there with professional experience who would love to volunteer their talents, just out of sheer love of the show. Both Neil Marsh, who composed the stunning incidental music, and Mark Sachs, who did our gorgeous computer animations, asked to join the project after seeing me mention it in the rec.arts.drwho newsgroup on the Internet. They were both willing to forego getting paid just for the pleasure of making Doctor Who. I'm incredibly grateful to all the volunteers we found in the rec.arts.drwho community -- without them, "Time Rift" would still have gotten done, but it would never have looked anywhere near as good.

THE STORY

The script which I wrote with AC and Amy was a fannish labor of love; we tried to tie it in with Who continuity, without making it entirely dependent on past stories. While capturing the style of the show was important, we deliberately decided not to limit ourselves to learning only from one era of the series. We wanted to incorporate the insights into the Doctor and Ace's characters from the New Adventures novels, while at the same time remembering the clear storytelling of the Terrance Dicks / Robert Holmes years.

The only problem we really had with the script was that, well, we didn't actually finish it until after we'd been shooting for more than a year. There were days when I'd stay up till 4 AM trying to pound scenes into shape before we shot them the following afternoon. This is all too common in the industry, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

THE SHOOTING

If you really want to know about the making of "Time Rift", in more detail than I could go into here, then seriously, rent Tim Burton's "Ed Wood". The resemblance to what we went through is absolutely uncanny. Ed got to deal with the recastings in mid-picture, the on-set romances and catfights, the miracles worked on zero budget, the midnight what-am-I-doing-with-my-life angst sessions, and those amazing moments where it all seems to come together.

Our first day of shooting, we ended up covered with ticks and mosquito bites, our prop TARDIS collapsed on us, and we had to scrap everything we shot because it looked horrible.

Our second day of shooting, the original actor who was supposed to play Timothy Hartnell dropped out of the production half an hour before he was supposed to head to the location. While we frantically hunted down a replacement, the original actor who was supposed to play Dr. Black got fed up and went home, as did the owner of our UNIT van. After we got only a couple of usable shots, then the thunderstorm started, and I ended up having a near breakdown over dinner with the cast and crew.

Ah, but our third day of shooting, in just a couple of hours we shot the entire subway chase sequence from part one -- a sequence which viewers have consistently cited as one of the high points of the story.

Once you click, you've clicked.

And from then on, there was no looking back... after all, we were always too busy trying to surmount the next crisis. Whether it was our naval base gatehouse getting demolished between shooting days, or an actor showing up with his moustache shaved off, there was always something happening to prove that Murphy ain't kidding.

Given the resources we had for production, we worked miracles. Most of the scenes were shot single-camera from a bunch of different angles, using an ordinary VHS camcorder and a boom microphone (well, actually a microphone duct-taped onto the end of a paint-roller extender pole, with a few chopsticks taped in to brace it). Note to any aspiring directors -- do not try this at home! If there's one thing I would change about the production process, it's the quality of our recording equipment -- had we only known this story would look so professional in every other way, we would have gotten our hands on better hardware!

Still, what we lacked in resources we made up for in enthusiasm. (That could almost be the motto for Doctor Who in general.)

GETTING IT DONE

There were more ups and downs over the years of production than I can begin to tell -- ranging from my utter heartbreak when AC left the project because the emotional strain on her life was too great, to our sheer gleeful mania as we got an amazing scene in the can just before a thunderstorm hit. But finally, within about a year and a half, we'd finished most of the shooting. We got a more-or-less final edit of Part 1 ready for Visions '94. At the same time, New Adventures author Kate Orman, who I'd met over the net, asked for a copy to show at an Australian convention.

It then took us nearly another whole year to get in the last few days of shooting, mainly because of the general fatigue of the few cast and crew members who hadn't yet finished their parts. Meanwhile, I was spending huge numbers of hours editing the last three episodes at a company called "The Video Editor". I became such a permanent fixture at their place that ultimately they hired me -- after all, they knew I knew their equipment backwards. Still, it took about three months just for me to make back all the money I'd paid them for the editing so far.

Finally, we were ready for our official world premiere, at the Visions '95 convention. Literally hours before we hopped on the plane, I was still frantically putting on finishing touches (like the end credits). I spent the next three days on a complete adrenaline buzz -- I have vague memories of blithering madly in front of an audience of about four dozen, and sitting in absolute shock as they all applauded at the end. The rest is the happiest blur of my life.

After Visions, we took a couple of months to dub additional music, tighten up a few scenes, and put together the blooper reel (which is about as long as an episode in itself). And then, finally, in March of 1996, we started shipping copies.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN!

Almost all the comments I've heard on "Time Rift" have been positive. Whether they loved or hated the McCoy era (or the New Adventures, or the new telefilm), just about everyone seemed to feel that "Time Rift" perfectly captured what they saw as that unique Doctor Who spirit. I've gotten praise from NA authors like Paul Cornell, a thumbs-up from Doctor Who Magazine reviewer Dave Owen, and Sylvester McCoy himself dropped in at the Visions showing and told the cast and crew "well done"!

Oh yeah, and because of the correspondence which started up after she told me how much she liked "Time Rift", Kate Orman and I fell in love. We met for the first time at the Visions '95 premiere and, at the time of this writing, I'm now living with her down in Sydney, Australia. You can't get a better review than that.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Even more gratifying than the reviews, in a way, is the fact that so many of our cast and crew have "caught the creative bug" from this project. Cary Gordon, one of our camera and sound people, now works as a freelance cameraman. Ben Steele started volunteering at his local public-access cable station. Marsha Twitty (General Kramer) has been persuaded by the fan letters she's received to keep on acting, and is currently after me to direct another video. Itzy Friedman (Dr. Black) has come out of his acting retirement; so far this year he's played Horace Vandergelder in a production of "Hello Dolly" and Col. Pickering in "My Fair Lady".

And me... thanks entirely to "Time Rift", I've found a new career as a video editor. The success of this video has given me the confidence to try everything from pitching a cable-access TV series to co-writing a novel with Kate. Because of this story, I've strained friendships, botched up love affairs, suffered years of stress and chaos... but also found a circle of friends with amazing creativity, and opened more doors than I could ever have imagined at the start. Now we have something we can all point to and say we made this, and be proud. And in the end that's what it's all for.

Would I do it again? In a cold minute.

...I can't believe I just wrote that.

Jon Blum
jblum@zip.com.au