Happy Who Year, everyone! (Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)
With this being the year of the 50th anniversary, I thought that you all might be interested in looking at the first part of a fan edited documentary I'm making.
When I first tried to learn more about classic Who, I found two documentaries: 1993's "Thirty Years in the TARDIS" and 2003's "The Story of Doctor Who." While both are excellent, it wasn't until I saw both that I really felt like I understood anything about the classic era. Both of them only seemed to have about half the necessary info. So I decided to combine them into one long documentary.
It wasn't as simple as just sticking one documentary on the end of another, though. Naturally, I had to put all of the First Doctor footage together, then all the second Doctor footage, etc. (There are a lot of clips that are associated by theme rather than era; I left those sections as they were.) Then, because both specials reuse some of the same footage from episodes, I had to make sure that no footage was repeated.
The hardest part was probably when new interview dialogue existed over footage that had already been seen as part of the other documentary. I had to eliminate the footage and replace it with something else so I could keep the audio, or if it was in the same general section, stretch the footage out to cover more than one audio clip. It was pretty daunting at times!
I'm almost done with the classic era; now I'm looking to finish the documentary off with information about the post-1989 period to today, which neither of the documentaries cover. I have some good footage of Russell T. Davies talking about his four years on the show, but if anyone knows where I can legally obtain some documentary footage on the 1996 TV movie or some footage with Steven Moffat, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan talking about the current series, I would really appreciate the tip.
I also have some footage of RTD, Moffat and David Tennant talking about the classic Doctors which I intend to sprinkle throughout the documentary. I believe that I also came across some footage of Matt Smith also talking about the classic Doctors, but I can't remember where I saw it. If anyone could jog my memory, again, I would appreciate it.
I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the video footage. As with the Holiday Special, the source material is just not all that great. The source in this case is (are?) old VHS tapes. If anyone has any suggestions for improving the quality, I'm willing to listen, but I honestly think this is as good as it's going to get.
If you're unfamiliar with the specials, you can find "The Story of Doctor Who" in its entirety on YouTube, and watch a few minutes of that for comparison purposes. At this point I need to stress that both documentaries are currently commercially unavailable. I actually
wish that the BBC would re-release these documentaries on DVD, because that would give me better source material from which to ply my trade. In the meantime, I don't think I'm breaking any rules of the site by mentioning that there's a commercially unavailable special on YouTube. I'm not including the links, and I'll happily amend this statement if asked to do so.
Well, enough blathering from me. Here's Part 1 (the first 10 minutes or so). I hope you enjoy it. I look forward to the feedback!