With just 6 days remaining until 'Grand Designs' Goes live I have written a post for each day counting down until the launch of the episode. I will try and put a little sneak peek or a small giveaway of some sorts into each of the posts and have some interesting ideas lined up.
Today is a history of the many versions that my fan series and indeed this episode went through before becoming what hopefully lots of people will see on August 31st 2009 (Its in italics so that it forms a commentary-type narrative)
Originally conceived over 2 years ago I first started thinking about making a fan series after seeing the end of Doctor Who Series 2 and watching Rose leave. Not happy with this as a resolution I planned a very rough 13 episode series that dealt with her return and used ‘the movies’ from Lionhead Studios to start animating it.
However it soon became clear that I had been far to grand with my ideas for the series and that what I wanted to do simply wasn’t possible. Coupled with this was the fact that at the time I had a very slow computer and hadn’t really written the scripts for any of the episodes.
From there the series then got cut down and lengthened and eventually I decided that I could do an 11 part series that culminated in a multi-doctor story against a new enemy called the editor. Whilst this looked much better (Thanks in no small matter to the purchase of the stunts and effects expansion pack) and even had a website and some trailers it was still too rushed and the plot had more wholes than a sieve.
I was just about to give up when something happened that really inspired me to start again but to do things properly. My computer hard drive through a wobbly and deleted my iMovie project folder so I lost all I had previously done. From there on in it was a new start. A lot of the old stories got binned and I decided to start small and work up, hence the four specials that are being released this year.
Grand Designs came from an original story that I ‘penned’ but had a name change. Originally called ‘the Helsinki incident’ it became Grand Designs after I had mapped out a story arc for the four specials, so although it sounds like a random name there is a point to it.
With the stunts and effects installed for the movies I had the freedom to shoot how I wanted. Grand Designs had a proper script and on August 31st will become the first of hopefully many doctor who episodes.
Be sure to visit tomorrow when I shall be uploading new and exclusive still pictures from Grand Designs.
