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!!