Terror of the Zygons DVD

UPDATED 01/08/2013

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The ‘Terror of the Zygons’ DVD has been officially announced for release on 30th September 2013.

The DVD will contain a special “director’s cut” of episode one, incorporating newly discovered footage which has now been colourised by myself and the key-frames interpolated by Peter Crocker. The footage had originally been excised from the episode prior to transmission due to a grading issue which could not be corrected at the time. Once believed lost, the sequence was subsequently discovered amongst the collection of the story’s film editor Ian McKendrick.

Originating from an editing print, the scene was found to consist of a mixture of both colour and monochrome shots. It has now been fully restored to colour for release.

The project involved me hand-colourising just over 300 key-frames. I worked on the project for 8 weeks (between 10th February – 23rd April 2012) during which time I re-colourised a total of five shots, running to approximately one minute ten seconds. Due to the reduced time on the project, some short-cuts were taken by employing flat washes on Sarah and Harry’s clothing and on the TARDIS.

Regrettably, I did not have the newly restored and graded episode one to work with, nor recovered colour footage but, instead, had to match my colour palette to about 20 ungraded screen-grabs which were sent to me by SVS Resources. My colourisation work was therefore made to match the “raw” colour footage which had been discovered rather than the existing episode surrounding it and – as a consequence – required a vigorous re-grade to match the broadcast film sequences. This regrade required a strong injection of blue into the shots which, on occasion, knocked out the skin tones – most notably on Ian Marter’s face. SVS attempted to ameliorate the effect by applying, a translucent wash over Harry’s face in post production, but the effect can still be noticed by the keen-eyed viewer.

I did not attend the grading, which was performed by Jonathan Wood at BBC TV Centre on Thursday 26th April 2012.

Details of my other colourisation work for the BBC Doctor Who DVD range can be seen here: The Mind of Evil and here: Genesis of the Daleks