Today I'm going to talk about something a bit different, because instead of moaning about things that other, far more qualified filmmakers have put out into the world, I'm going to moan about something that I made. This is something I'd like to start talking about more, as I have a lot of exciting things in the works. Those who have followed me for some time will know that this particular project occupied a large part of my life for the best part of two years and is something I am still very proud of. However, as a filmmaker, there is a lot that can be gained when you take off your rose-tinted glasses of pride and look back on your creation from a distance, having sent it out into the world and watched it make its own mistakes. I've been active in a small filmmaking sphere for the best part of ten years now, but this was my first attempt at such a large project (1 hour 40 minutes in total), and for the first time, I am at a point where I can look back untinted and start to pick up lessons from the experience of creating my first feature film.
Doctor Who: A Matter of Time (2018) is a non-profit fan-made stop-motion animation based on the BBC One television show of the same name. It is the culmination of a number of shorter animations created by a group of fans, including myself, across a number of years and follows two incarnations of the iconic Time Lord (played by myself and Jessica Osborne) who are reaching the end of their lives. As they face the sinister 'Collective,' an army built of several of their oldest enemies, they are forced to confront the consequences of their actions and move forward to the future in order to continue to be the Doctor. This future is manifested in the form of a third incarnation (played by Madison Brunoehler), who must work with her other selves to forgive the mistakes of her past. Along the way, they face a medieval town overrun with futuristic technology, a corporate war in the far future, the last remnant of an ancient society from the dawn of time, and an old friend-turned-enemy who knows them better than anyone. It is a fairly simplistic closing chapter, but the aim of the project was to wrap up nine years of stories (with the indication that the story could keep going forever, as is the magic of Who) while also presenting the ideal Doctor Who movie that is accessible to casual audiences and contains all they key themes, tropes and symbolism fans have grown to love. Daleks, Cybermen and the Master all return to plague this adventure, along with original villains created specifically for this narrative.
At this point, I had been running a YouTube channel publishing content of this nature for about nine years and was looking for the perfect conclusion to that part of my life, and a feature-length film seemed like the perfect challenge. Perhaps a little too hastily, I announced the project to my viewers under the codename 'The Phase Two Movie' without much thought about whether or not it would actually be possible. This was, after all, the largest project I had ever attempted, and it would have to be made on more or less zero budget using just my uncle's old DSLR, a very basic lighting kit, a printer, and the roughly 400 action figures that made up my collection. After an extensive writing and casting process, production began in the summer of 2017. The three acts were separated into four blocks, with locations that carried across all three acts such as the TARDIS console room being shot in the first block and the remaining three being separated into locations only needed in specific acts. Production on these blocks went as smoothly as it had ever gone on projects of this nature, and was followed up by a fifth block of reshoots after I had decided to alter certain story elements. I know, I'm never happy. It is not until everything started to come together, however, that we start to see the cracks in this approach begin to widen.
Until this point, none of my animations had been more than half an hour long. Most averaged around the 15-20 minute mark. Applying the exact same approach to producing a feature-length film as I did to those, however, is where I hit a small snag. Stop-motion animation, for those who are not aware, involves capturing motion frame-by-frame with a stills camera and stringing them together in post-production to create the illusion of motion. It's like a live-action film in that respect, except the camera strings the frames together itself in those instances. Stop-motion is generally played at half the frame-rate of standard video (around 12 frames per second instead of 25), which gives it that charming hand-made effect you see when you watch a Wallace and Gromit film. Without the large team of animators present on an Aardman feature, however, it was difficult to keep this effect consistent or do many extensive motion sequences. Additionally, a large shift in production quality was seen by the time block three was reached; I bought a new, much more modern DSLR which was much better equipped for animation. As a one-man production team, it becomes very difficult to make sure each individual aspect of the filmmaking process is as high quality as it can be. Only being able to devote a small amount of my time and attention to each individual detail often resulted in continuity errors, scruffy-looking set constructions, choppy animation or missed sound cues. The result of this, however, is the answer to a question a lot of filmmakers must ask themselves: am I capable of making a full feature film all by myself?
In the end, A Matter of Time was released in three separate parts to be a bit kinder to a YouTube audience. However, to my surprise, it is the full 'omnibus' version of the movie that has thrived more than the separate instalments, even reaching outside of the community within which it was conceived. Of course, my initial goal of creating *the* ideal Who movie was never going to be a possibility, and building a project around a property for which there is already such a strong feeling of ownership by the hardcore fanbase could never satisfy everybody. Regardless, the amount of love and warmth it has received continues to overwhelm me, and reminds me that despite the sometimes immersion-shattering flaws scattered throughout, audiences will always resonate with something that has been made with care and passion. Of course I didn't make this movie entirely on my own; I had my outstanding voice cast and friends from the community, many of whom brought their own skills and ideas to particular sequences. Even if anybody was capable of making a movie on their own, why would they want to? One of the joys of filmmaking over any other collective medium is the bonds you build along the way, and finally being able to sit back afterwards and see all that talent, camaraderie and passion represented in the product of your labours. Nobody wants to see a film made by Cybermen - it's the unique perspective of everybody involved in a film that makes it one of the most expressive and immersive art forms there is. Even if I go on to make a million movies, this silly toy animation about a time-travelling bohemian will always be my first, and it will always have a special place in my heart for all the connections it helped me forge. It is the culmination of everything I learned about film in the first twenty years of my life, and anything that comes after is what I've learned from this experience, without which my journey in the media industry could never be the same.
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