If you were wondering what the hell was going on in this episode, then congratulations! You’re not alone.
If, on the other hand, you got the gag and thought it was funny … congratulations! You’re not alone either.
There’s not really much to explain about this one other than the perhaps the point.
After the last two extremely intensive shorts, and with another three day window, I just wanted to do something short and simple. Visually I wanted it to look like a bad art/film student short film. Black and white with lots of silence and moody staring. The kind of thing which could be considered high-art … if it just weren’t quite so awful.
The whole thing is constructed around a bad pun on the title of the Doctor Who episode we were watching. Obviously the rings in this case are telephone rings instead of rings of a planet.
The long, somber, over-dramatic opening credits are just to increase the build up to the bad throwaway pun. The challenge there was to balance the drama, the humour and the pomposity. Hopefully that worked.
There’s nothing else going on, it’s just a shaggy dog story.
Filming wise, I just pointed my phone at my daughter and told her to look cross. The whole thing took about ten minutes.
Effects wise there’s nothing going on. Just a colour filter which strips out everything except blue.
I did have to create a black and white layer for the right hand side of the screen so that the Captain America bag didn’t have a blue centre, but that’s about it.
Weirdly, I still see the colours in that shield. Even though I know it’s black and white.
Similarly the TARDIS looked black and white even though I knew it was blue. I just upped the colour saturation there to compensate.
The only prop built was the Beano:
Which was made to replicate the one Matt Smith read in the actual Rings of Ahkaten:
It’s a lot smaller and it doesn’t have the date, but for a throwaway gag it’ll do. The insides are just a few sheets of paper, just to give it depth:
The drumming music came from here:
And the spooky bells/chimes came from here:
Both of these people are incredibly kind to upload their music for use in silly projects such as these.
And that’s it. It’s a two minute exercise in trolling. A massive dramatic build up leading to a terrible pun and a nonsensical ending, all wrapped up in a shell designed to mimic the kind of terribly pompous films I’ve often been subjected to at film festivals.
Given what the intention was, I’m immensely proud of it. It makes me giggle and that’s all it was meant to do.
The next one should be out on Saturday: a two-parter with a our first cliffhanger!
The Jobbing Scriptwriter 