Thundermaus 2019: back to the grindstone...

Thundermaus 2019: 

Back to the Grindstone...

After almost a three year long hiatus, I've decided to come back to Thundermaus and give it another shot. Its not been easy coming back to this but I always felt the series never got the exposure it should have done.

Anyway, I was ploughing through the BBC pages and thought - why not just contact the BBC about Thundermaus? So over this christmas I spent many hours cutting together a 'definitive episode', based on what little footage I had left from a promotional video shot in 2016. This new re-cut would be a sort of pilot episode, that I could show the BBC, to give them an idea of the level of production values I'm aiming for. 

The main problem is that the footage I had shot back in 2016, had no beginning, so extra voice over work had to be done and intercut with existing footage to create a 'cold open' - thats the bit of action, that sets up the story before they run the opening credits. 

Then there was no opening credits - so again a lot of editing and a definitive theme tune had to be recorded in Logic. So I'm quite pleased with the way that theme tune came out. I pretty much based it on the original 48hr pilot version and then jazzed it up with some funky drums and fuzz guitar, plus a few orchestral samples to make it sound more epic. If I ever get the funding, I would record it with a full on brass orchestra. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

But I'de forgotten how much I hate editing. Let me re-phrase that. I hate the instability of it all. My Mac is ten years old. Which means that it crashes every ten seconds when I try to edit anything as complex as a Thundermaus episode. And Thundermaus episodes are proving difficult to cut. My basic rule of thumb is to get as much as possible right in camera before anything else. That means spending a long time lighting models and getting a good set of camera angles. If I get that bit right then the rest is easy, or should be anyway. 

I spent a lot of time just editing a few shots of the Thundermaus space ship flying thru space. It shouldn't have been that hard but the filming conditions were not exactly ideal. We filmed everything in a cold and damp garage that constantly leaked all over the place. To make matters worse, most of the cameras couldn't handle low light levels and only a few of these space shots were ever usable. What they needed was Gerry Anderson's team to make them really work. 

But never mind. After a lot of swearing at the computer, I finally managed to get it to export a final definitive cut of what a Thundermaus episode might look like. Its very short (exactly 5 and a half minutes) but it sums up the characters, the special effects and general craziness I'm working towards. 

The next step is get a half hour show made. But I don't fancy going through the hell of a cold damp garage to film it. But a new team must be assembled, a workshop (preferably warm and dry) must be found and above all, a platform such as the BBC, to make it into a workable series format...