A lovely bumper TOS-piece today with details on a number of lovely brilliant sounding extras for the Back to Earth DVD, expanding somewhat on the hints we’ve been seeing recently.

Firstly, we get confirmation of an extension to the broadcast Making Of in the form of The Making Of Back To Earth: Part 2. At about 50 minutes long it’ll take the running time for the whole Making Of package to 70-75 minutes, which is about the length of previous documentaries, despite Back To Earth only being three episodes long. The Making Of is longer than the feature. Beautiful madness.

Anyway, it seems we can expect pretty much the same stuff we’ve seen on previous DVD documentaries but with the added advantage of it being part of the main production so we get stuff like time lapse footage of Rober’s make-up session, improvised dialog and fucking footage from an abandoned scene. The fruits of not having to search unlabelled tapes in the BBC archive to find interesting nuggets of footage, there. We’re also promised a look at Howard Burden’s costume department, which should be a real treat considering Back To Earth represents some of his finest work on Red Dwarf

We’re *really* being spoilt on the FX side, however, as in addition to covering the creation of the new Red Dwarf ship we have an entirely separate featurette called The SFX of Back to Earth giving us a guided tour of some of the effects Mike and his team created in-between shrimp BBQs and trying to avoid Ray Mears while traversing The Bush, or something. Those who’ve listened to Mike’s podcasts will know that this is likely to be very enlightening and interesting, especially since the budget circumstances will no doubt bring up all sorts of interesting tricks and techniques they needed to use to get things done. I’d also like to see some raw effects shots on the DVD, too. And a hot egg.

Next up is Back to Earth Premiere which is GNP’s own coverage of the Berkely Square event, including the premiere which took place later that day. This will be great, obviously, as seeing some footage from the actual premiere event will be fascinating. Also featured will be Terry Pratchett and some of you ugly fuckers.

Finally, what the fuck is this Cast Signing Session? It took place in Shepperton on the last day of filming and I had no idea it was happening! Anyway, there’s a whole featurette covering the chat/signing session so we can all wallow in the fact THAT WE WEREN’T FUCKING THERE (NB: Obviously, I made the wrong assumption here that some fans were present to get stuff signed, but obviously that wasn’t the case. This is what happens when I rush things when I’m supposed to be WORKING.) There’s also some confirmation in there that we’ll be getting the various videos created by Dave during the lead-up to broadcast, which will be nice as having as much of that promo material as possible will help make the set feel even more complete and generally awesome.

It’s not long now until release, everyone, and I honestly think this could end up being my favourite DVD of the lot. Well, probably just behind Bodysnatcher, to be honest.

19 comments on “Fuckloads of Awesome Shit

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  • Like I said, I want one of those photos. I wrote to ‘Dave Lister’ and co at Dave’s address as soon as it was published on the ‘Scanning Jupiter’ website, and I thought I might get something then, but knowing that there’s some new signed photos out there somewhere… Oh it makes me mad.

  • > It took place in Shepperton on the last day of filming and I had no idea it was happening!

    The four guys grabbed a chance during a scheduled break to sit in a back office and sign some photos intended for promotional use. For some weird reason nobody thought to call you… :-)

  • Wasn’t a giant making of originally planned for Series VIII?

    The SFX extra looks very interesting, I hope we get more like the thing they did in the last scene to make it seem like the corridor was longer by adding a model to the end and lining it up with the camera, when they revealed that I was blown away, it looks so good.

  • I hope we get more like the thing they did in the last scene to make it seem like the corridor was longer by adding a model to the end

    I see a nob gag in there.

    Yeah, I know. My dirty mind.

  • Red Dwarf DVDs are always of an amazingly high standard but as these were the first episodes made with a DVD release in mind, this DVD is looking to be the best one yet!

  • Any time. Any time in the next fifteen minutes. Because that is the period of time in which you were hoping to fuck Sophie.

  • Idea for a programme called, ‘Free Spirits’.

    …No actually, change that to ‘Bad Attitude’.

  • > The four guys grabbed a chance during a scheduled break to sit in a back office and sign some photos intended for promotional use. For some weird reason nobody thought to call you? :-)

    Ah, I was in a bit of a rush and one an assumption I made was that fans were present! But thinking about it for more than a second should’ve told me otherwise…

  • > an assumption I made was that…

    Well you know what assumption did. It had a beer and cheated on its wife.

  • OOH!! Lovely menu shots at TOS today. Saying nothing more, I’m sure they’ll be highlighted front page within the hour.

    EDIT: It’s an hour and a half since I posted this. Still nothing front page. Slow today. What are they doing? Working?! Tut.

  • You clearly haven’t been around this site long enough ;-)

    We have all been a bit BUSY recently, though. Sorry.

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