Kennington

We used a studio at Kennington, which we found through a friend of mine Alan Stevens who's doing the Kaldor City thing. He'd discovered the studio, and I thought "This is nice, we could do the Doctor Who's here."

So I got Gary and Nick round, the first one we recorded was 'The Shadow of the Scourge'. As this was my first recording there, I wasn't used to the place, there were areas of the room that were better than others acoustically, there were other areas that were really splashy, and others that were quite dead. It took me a while to work out where these places were, and how to position the screens and mics and stuff, to get the best out of it. 

So it was fortunate that it was set in a hotel. Normally when I do these things, according to wherever the scene is set I'll add some sort of reverb, even if it's very, very subtle, almost unnoticeable, just to give an audio clue as to where you are. Some of the script writers just blandly put location at the top, and no other clue, the characters might not even refer to where they are, so it's down to me to try and find a way of telling people where we are, which can be a bit frustrating. Once you've established that location you can go somewhere else, and when you come back you think "Oh, we're back here again". Audio shorthand.

Because of when we did the "Scourge", I'd set the actors into position, and have screens all around them, but it wasn't dead enough, but fortunately those scenes were in hotel foyers or large rooms, so I didn't need to put any reverb on the voice at all, just a bit to stereo it up, the acoustic you can hear is the acoustic of the studio, but I got away with it.

Travis:The Final Act

With Travis:The Final Act doing the editing was horrendous, and the end result, looking back on it now makes me cringe.

The music is too loud for a start. To edit the interviews I'd record the first bit onto the multi-track from cassette, quickly fade out at the end of the clip I wanted as I was recording it, cue up the next bit on cassette, pause it, play back the multitrack tape, and just at the right point I'd release the pause button, and record the next bit of the interview on another track.

The end result would be an apparently seamless interview, but with the audio jumping from track to track to achieve this result. If only I could do digital editing in those days!

I'd always buy cassette machines that had an instantaneous pause, not one of those mechanical things that you press it and it goes "kerklunk, chink, badoing". Two seconds later.

Now I can take all of that stuff and make it sound like they read the dialogue perfectly from the page, and the advantage would be I could shorten it. I remember that for the end result I had to run the multitrack slightly fast to get it to fit on the final cassette master, because it was all slightly too long.

Kaldor City

So we did, Travis:The Final Act , and then later "The Mark of Kane" and "The Logic of Empire".  They rang me, about Kaldor City, and said "Fancy doing this?", and I said "Yes, but I don't know when"

We have recorded the first two, the first one is written by Alan Stevens and Jim Smith, and the second one is by Chris Boucher and it features characters that Chris Boucher created both in Blake's 7 and Doctor Who.

It's a minefield as to what the BBC owns and what Terry Nation's estate owns, but Chris Boucher has the copyright on those characters that he created, the fact that they were created in a world owned by somebody else, is something else again. 

We recorded those in August 2000, it was the second thing we recorded at Kennington, because we recorded the Scourge there, and by Kaldor City we had sorted out the mic positions, which was nice.  I'll do all of the post-production, music, sound effects for Kaldor City, originally I said February, but we're looking at July at the earliest now.