The Millennium Trap now available on virtual DVD

Friday, December 04, 2009

One of the most respected Doctor Who fan films, The Millennium Trap, is now available for download.

The film has been fully restored, with new special effects and CGI added – along with a range of extras which have never been included before.

Nick Scovell as the DoctorNick Scovell as the Doctor

The film stars Nick Scovell as the Doctor. Anyone who attended the stage plays of Evil of the Daleks and the Dalek Masterplan will know that Nick puts in an excellent performance as the Doctor and The Millennium Trap is no exception. Like all good Doctors, Nick borrows a little of his performance from Doctors of old while adding enough of himself in to make the performance his own.

As a fan film, Millennium Trap stands head and shoulders above most other productions. It’s very well written, acted and directed, superbly edited, and fully deserves its status as one of the best rated fan films.

An old enemy returnsAn old enemy returns

What’s even better from our perspective is that the Millennium Trap is set by the Daleks – giving Nick again the chance to square off against the Doctor’s greatest foes.

Ever since Doctor Who Magazine lauded ‘The Millennium Trap’ way back in issue 275, the three-part fan film has been regarded as something of a classic of it type. Now, some 12 years after it was made it’s had something of a makeover and been made freely available to download from the web.

Producer Rob Thrush has always been proud of what he and his team created but “back then of course there were no computer editing or animation available to us and in a way that helped us to recreate the 60s style look. But our expertise in things like the model shots was always rather lacking. I came across the undubbed master tapes for episodes 1 and 2 ages ago and digitised them as the tapes were degrading. Where part 3 went I don’t know but I had a duplication master of that with all the music and sound effects mixed, so that got saved as well – our own Missing Believed Wiped episode!” Having preserved them Rob started work on tidying the episodes up a bit. “The first two episodes had only the dialogue but no music so I was able to tidy up the sound a bit and remix the music. Part three didn’t get a lot of sound work. I fixed the worst tape glitches but by then I had a copy of Lightwave and started playing about with creating new model sequences to replace the worst of the existing sequences. Unexpectedly I came across a tape of raw footage from the studio including the Thal fighter cockpit sequences, so I was able to do a better job on the chromakey shots in episodes one and three and replace them. Suddenly it became a bigger project!”

Once he’d decided to make a DVD his attention turned to extra features. At the time some footage had been shot chronicling the Dalek and set building, so that made up one feature, a blooper reel was discovered and the unedited studio footage made a third. Now a professional film-maker with his own studio it seemed an obvious step to reunite the cast to share their memories of the filming. “It wasn’t easy to pull everyone together on one day and even on the recording day we had to stagger the sessions to get everyone who wanted to take part!” Rob decided that rather than interview everyone himself, he’d get a fellow fan to whom he loaned the original version to devise the questions. “Adrian Cranwell-Child had operated Daleks on stage with us and is Who mad, so it seemed a good idea give him carte blanche and ask the questions that occurred to him. I think it made the whole thing more spontaneous because he genuinely wanted answers!”

So finally, after three years of on and off tweaking, one of the best-loved fan films is available on DVD to download and put alongside ‘proper’ Who. Download it free.