Tape Worms!
I finally finished the sound design for Doctor Who - The Wormery by Stephen Cole and Paul Magrs in September 2003 after first beginning tinkering with it in January.
Rest assured, I was doing other things in between. A very long slog, but great, great fun, despite, ooh, just about every form of system crash and loss of files known to man and machine in the process.
There's a special kind of despair known only to sound designers when you've just put together a complex many-layered crowd scene and you were, honestly, just about to save, only to have your multi-tracking package seize up, lose your work and ask if it can tell Microsoft about it.
How we laugh. Hollowly.
It stars Colin Baker as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Iris Wildthyme and Maria McErlane as Bianca, features beautiful songs and music by Steve Cole and Jason Loborik and deals, as much Doctor Who has in recent years, with the nature of history. It came out in November 2003 just before Doctor Who's 40th anniversary.
I like this one a lot, though in bumping up crowd noise at the last minute for director Gray Russell, I make a horrible mistake in one episode where after a gun shot which should silence the hall, there are still a few people left chatting away obliviously. The other thing I dislike a bit is the extreme stereo pans I put on the shadow voice reverbs. Way too much in retrospect.
One bit of trivia the tape recordings the play features, made by Bianca in 1930s Germany are anachronistic, with the only 'tape' machine she'd have access to in those days being the potentially lethal Blattnerphone, which recorded onto thin sheets of steel. You didn't want to be anywhere near one of those if the tape snapped.
The tape machine I actually used to 'play' Bianca's was a reel to reel Studer from the 1970s, that sits proudly in my attic workroom taking up an unreasonable amount of room. It sounds right, even if historically it isn't.
But then of course, at Bianca's, you're never quite hearing what you imagine you are, and all such anachronisms are possible...
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