Squid and the Daleks

‘Squid and the Daleks’ is the brain child of me and my friend Aaron Newbigging and our mutual love of Doctor Who and… Uh… Squids.  This post is quite late as the actual video came out a while ago, but I thought I’d throw it on here along with some musings and insights.

Not entirely sure how this came about! I think it started with the sound, the “GLAGHURAGLHG”! Aaron would make this sound and somehow it was given to a Squid character who would throw rocks. And somehow we had the idea of placing Squid into a Doctor Who story and making him the companion. We are sort of insane.

I wrote the script out in under and hour at about midnight, just feverishly tapping out the ideas. I had the chalk pit in mind as a location and I knew I wanted to use Daleks, and I knew I had to incorporate Squids love of rocks. My process was that I had 3 central jokes, the simple fact that Squid is the companion, Squid throwing the rock at the Dalek, and then Squid getting down on the floor when he should be running.  I then just sort of wrote all the stuff in between these jokes, filling it with random and mostly nonsense dialogue. Professional script writing!

I think a really cool tip actually is to write for any awesome locations you know you have. If I’d written a script set on a space ship then… Well it wouldn't have worked. But because I wrote for this chalk pit really close to my house it worked out really well. Take advantage of your surroundings, that’s what I’m saying!

Filming was… interesting. I don’t want to say it was a nightmare, because most of it was actually quite fun. But then think of how tough it was… the word “Nightmare” springs to mind. Okay, so a nice nightmare, like a nightmare in which you’re walking a tight rope whilst eating delicious chocolates. On the one hand: delicious chocolates, huzzah! On the other hand: you are on a tight rope and could fall down hard if you lose balance. Yes, filming was just like that.

The chalk pit is a gorgeous location, and I think a pretty big factor in the videos success. It looks straight out of a Classic Who story and sets the scene perfectly. Can you imagine if we’d done exactly the same video but just in the garden? It could have looked kind of lame.

Our main adversary upon reaching the chalk pit was the pretty strong wind. Now we anticipated that it would completely blow out the sound, meaning we would have to re-dub all the dialogue, however we did not foresee the epic battle of the wind V.S the tripod. The tripod was blown over several times despite our efforts to weigh it down with large pieces of chalk. Luckily the mighty camera is made of strong stuff and even though it was knocked down a few times it always got back up. Good work camera.

Aaron suffered much in the filming. He over dosed on jelly babies after I didn’t properly communicate to him that he didn’t need to actually eat the jelly babies, but just mime it. He also took one for the team when he got down and rolled about on the floor, injuring his shoulder greatly. He was not pleased. But rather awesomely he acted all the way through it, never once breaking the squid character despite the pain. However if you think his look of terror is rather convincing when he’s down on the ground, it’s probably because of the immense pain he’s feeling! Poor Aaron, we all love you!

Aaron in pain

So with the editing I basically had to just switch of the audio and completely reconstruct it from track. The wind distorted the sound of everything meaning the dialogue, foley sounds, and atmosphere had to be re-recorded or scavenged from the internet. This does give the video a sort of unnatural and synthetic sound, but this sort of suits the comedy, almost like it’s a live action cartoon.

An ultimately unused colour correction test

I contemplated doing some colour correction to make the scene look more alien, tint it purple or something, but decided that would sort of detract from the comedy. Whilst I wanted the effects to look nice I didn't want them to overpower the film. But then I didn't want them to be so awful that you couldn't concentrate on anything but they’re awfulness. So I had to be very careful with all my effects shots, to get them just right but not over-do them.

Then we have the effects, the lovely lovely effects. For putting the Dalek and the Tardis into the film I thought it might look cool and old school to composite models into the footage. So rather than rendering out a CGI police box and then popping it in the scene, I filmed a toy Tardis against a green screen. I even filmed the green screen outside so that the toys would have that natural outdoor lighting and so match the original footage. I think both effects work quite well, and the fact that the video is comedy means they don’t have to be perfect. The effects get away with being a bit cartoon-ish.

The rotoscoping was just a delightful walk in the park… *Sobs in corner*. I think I must have watched about 3 complete seasons of TV whilst rotoscoping me and Aarons flailing arms over top of the Tardis in After Effects. And let me tell you I got sick of seeing frame after frame of my face pretty quickly. If you don’t know, rotoscoping is basically taking the footage and tracing around the things you want to appear overtop of the Tardis. Because I suck at explaining tings, here are some visual explanations! Pictures yay!

Rotoscoping example

I edited to temporary music from Classic Who, with the idea that after editing was finished I would take it out and Aaron would then do his own score (he’s a musician you know!).  While he did do some very sweet tracks I did sort of fall in love with a few pieces from classic who, and so kept them in. Aaron did however do the very nice theme tune cover which I believe is up on his sound cloud if you want a better listen. 
https://soundcloud.com/aaron-newbigging

So what’s next for our beloved Squid?

Well we made this video without really thinking about the future. I mean when me and Aaron talk we talk utter nonsense and just throw video ideas back and forth. About half of these seem like a good idea five minutes later. A lot of these ideas have been Squid based, so I can probably confirm squid will return in some form. It’s all about grabbing the right idea out of this mess of random rubbish we create.

One thought was to put Squid into other films and franchises; Squid as Batman’s sidekick, Squid as captain of the Enterprise etc. Whilst this does comedic potential I have this feeling that Squid should stay in the Whoverse for now, along with his best friend, the slightly camp Doctor.

One question is whether or not to pick up the cliff-hanger left by ‘Squid and the Daleks’. A lot of peeps have asked when we’re making the next one and what happens to Squid. But an idea we had was to do Squid sketches and have each one be its own story with a cliff-hanger that’s endlessly left hanging, to have absolutely no continuity. Now I’m really into this idea and the potential it sets up, but we might in the end give in to public demand…

So basically Squid will return in his own little series of sorts… But we’re still figuring it out. And we’re definitely not doing a sequel for sequels sake, we have ideas!

To wrap this up I’m very pleased with the finished video and I think all the effort and time we put in really shows. Also the rock hitting the Dalek cracks me up every time, and I had to edit the damn thing! I’m also very pleased it’s had a positive response with viewers, and actually has quite a lot of views (well, by my videos standards). Thanks for reading/watching, and more cool stuff is coming in the future.

GLUAGH!!

The 'Raffers & Kay' Logos

So recently I designed a handful of logos for the comedy duo Raffers and Kay. So I thought I’d write up a little blog on the designing of the logos, mainly because this blog is very empty and I thought this might be a good something to fill it with.

The brief I got from Allen Rafferty was to create something “technical but quirky” and to use primary colours like red, blue, and yellow. Something I really wanted to get into the logos was a real sense of the characters, to evoke who they are, they’re eccentricity and childishness and friendly nature.

I had quite a few ideas just from the brief, and so decided to create a few designs that Allen could choose from. I tried to make them quite different, giving a couple of different directions to go from; however they all follow the brief in terms of style and colours.

Version One

So this was just my initial gut response to the task. This one was done simply on paper with big chunky coloured markers. I thought the sketchy doodle look would fit the energy of Raffers and Kay well, almost as if this is what the characters would draw if they were making their own logo. It tries to be big and epic with the perspective and 3d element, but the very imperfect style of it adds a quirkiness and childishness.

This first drawing also brought up a main problem to get around. Now I wanted to place the “Raffers” over top of the “Kay”, however “Kay” obviously has much less letters then “Raffers”. This made "Raffers" stand out much more and focus was pulled onto that name. But if I enlarged “Kay” then it became massive and focus was pulled to that. Now these two are a double act, I really didn't want the logo to make one of the names seem more important.  I probably wasn't very successful in making them equal in this first version, but the idea I hit on later was using the distance between the letters to make the two names fill the same amount of space.

Don’t understand? Use this handy dandy visual guide!

This logo also started the yellow oval background trend. It was only going to be the backing for this logo, done as a way to work the yellow colour into it, however I kept thinking that the latter logos needed some kind of back and kept coming back to that shape.

The hand drawn nature of this logo really sets it apart from the others. The others are all very similar and can be used together without clashing; they all have the clean graphical look. This leaves the first version looking almost more like concept art, figuring out the colours and spacing etc. before creating the finals in Illustrator.

However I really have a soft spot for this one. Yes it’s messy, yes it doesn't quite fit in, yes a 10 year old could probably have done it, but I think those might me just the reasons I love it so much…

Version Two

Next, I wanted to make a logo that incorporated Raffers and Kay themselves. The main reason I didn’t do any logos with really complex typography or graphic ideas was because I didn't want to pull focus away from the double act. The logo should really be about them as well as being their names.

So with this in mind I worked up some ideas of how they could fit in. I doodled out a few basic thoughts, one of which was to draw the two as cartoon characters.

I thought this was a bit distracting and hard to look at, as well as perhaps being misleading, as Raffers and Kay is not a cartoon. I thought a slightly more realistic version of this was in order, making the two guys into silhouettes, so that they’re sort of cartoons, but very realistic.

What this does is take the basic shape of the two and boil it down it its bare essentials. To create the simplified versions I had to ask myself; “What are the main features of Raffers and Kay?”

I also toyed with the idea of having the guys spell out the first letters of their names using their arms and legs. This idea was partly inspired by the “Change 4 Life” ads by Ardman.  In the end I thought this design would be too complex and hard to look at. At the size the figures would have to be at they would become unrecognizable as human figures, and just become weirdly distorted letters.





The reason the “Change 4 life” logo works is that the figures are large in the image and also very simple, just being clay models.

Now I had my idea of cut-out looking silhouettes of the guys, but I had to decide what to do with them. The concept of them holding up signs with their names on just sort of came to me. It’s a good way to tie together the figures and logo, and also show off the different personalities by the way each holds his sign. Allen Rafferty is sort of showing off his sign in a slightly cocky way, whilst Jacob Kay is really struggling with his, wobbling about with it.

Now the phrase from my brief; “Technical but quirky” immediately made me think of Adobe illustrator. All the vector art around the internet carries that very precise but very bizarre look. So after my hand drawn version, I turned to Illustrator for this next version.

To create the image I took a ton of reference pictures of myself holding up a large plastic lid. Now these are really out of focus (and slightly embarrassing) but they did the job well. As I couldn't get my whole body in frame I took to separate pictures and put them together in illustrator.

For the faces I just took screen shots of episodes of “Living with Raffers and Kay” and traced around them using the pen tool in illustrator, doing different shapes for the head and sections of hair. I then basically placed these on top of my body shapes. I did make the Kay figure slightly taller using a Raffers and Kay video as a rough guide.

Finally I sort of created a second variation on this logo. I thought perhaps that having the figures take up so much more space than the letters would stop you noticing them so much. The graphics might drown out the letters. So I just quickly did a version where I cut out the bottom halves of the characters, effectively halving the size of the logo.

Version Three

For the final logo I wanted to go back to something more based on the text. The letters aren’t made with an existing font; I drew them out with the pen tool. I thought a homemade font would add a certain charm to it, bringing it back to that quirkiness. I also thought this would avoid any sort of copyright on the font, because I really don’t want to be sued by anyone. Please.

The “&” symbol is traced from my hand drawn one from the first logo because… I thought it looked nice and liked the swish to it. Yes, it has a lot of swish to it. Swish being a technical term.

Even though I wanted it to be text focused I still wanted to find a way of incorporating the characters. I decided on placing them inside the letters, making them cut out pieces from the “A”. Luckily for me both of the names had A’s in so I could just place the guys’ heads into them. I’m also lucky in that the two’s most unique features are their hair styles, making them instantly recognizable from hair alone. Great hair guys, um… keep up the great style… Use shampoo… Um…

 I also discovered a cool way to solve my space problem of the two names not being equal. Whilst I did do a bit of spacing on the “Kay”, too much would have made it look weird and drawn out. So my adding the “&” sign I was able to fill space in the bottom half nicely. If that makes any sense at all.

I just copied the heads from the second logo and placed them into this one, and then added the now obligatory yellow circle backdrop, and presto. I’m rather pleased with this one and I think it really fills out the brief I was given. It also looks really quite snazzy and professional to me, like I can just imagine it sitting on the DVD cover of a sitcom season.

So in the end I’m very pleased with all the logos, with my favorites being version 1 and 2. Allen was very pleased with all of them and ended up throwing a couple up onto the Raffers and Kay Facebook page, Versions Two and Three, I believe. So yes, hop fully the pair can get a lot of use out of the logos and their audience can also get a kick out of them.

Thanks for listening… or… reading. And please check out “Raffers and Kay” (Now with a fancy logo) at these places:

https://www.facebook.com/raffersandkay?fref=ts

https://twitter.com/RaffersandKay

And find me at these spots, you know, if you feel like it:

https://twitter.com/SmithyPhox

https://www.youtube.com/user/doctorwhooutcast

http://pandawithgun.deviantart.com/