The Making
of Mission To The Unknown
By Derek Handley
At first glance a reconstruction of the single episode story Mission to the Unknown seems like a relatively straightforward task compared to some other recons… Until you realise that there are no telesnaps, no publicity pictures of any of the main characters and in fact the only pictures that have ever been printed are of a few aliens and Daleks around a conference table.
David Butler provided me with a copy of the episode soundtrack, recorded directly from his original off air recording. The tape he sent me was very clear and unlike many other soundtracks, this one had the full opening and closing title music recorded. However, it played slightly too fast, so the first thing I had to do was slow it down to match the duration of the original transmission. The recording only needed slight work to eliminate any hiss and boost up a few quiet patches.
Mission to the Unknown was the first reconstruction that I had done the full editing for. Previous to this release, Rick had always done the initial editing and I had done later changes to re-master for PAL and make other small changes.
Because Mission has such limited original photographic material, the reconstruction needed to be almost entirely made up of composite pictures. I was in the best position to do these composites so it made sense for me to do the video editing too. I could then make up the composite pictures as I needed them.
Having no photos at all for the three human characters was in some ways a blessing. If there were just one or two photos I would have had to make all the pictures of them throughout the recon fit that likeness for hairstyle, costume etc. As it was I was free to find suitable costumes for the characters to wear.
For some reason there was a misconception that, as Marc Cory was a Space Security Agent, he would be wearing the same style of costume that Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom wore in The Daleks' Master Plan. But Cory was working undercover, so would certainly not have been wearing Space Security uniform and neither would the others! I based the space suit costumes I used on the description of 'military style overalls' given in the camera script, I assumed that all three characters would be wearing the same style of costume.
I decided that the costumes worn by the humans in The Sontaran Experiment would be suitable as they fitted this description well and there were plenty of shots of them available from the video. This also had the benefit that a friend of mine (Tony Clark) had one of the original Sontaran Experiment costumes, which we could use if any additional pictures were needed.
I also had to find suitable pictures to use for the three actors involved: Edward de Souza, Jeremy Young and Barry Jackson. I wanted to use pictures of them from as close to 1965 as I could get suitable material for.
Edward de Souza had had a major role in an Honor Blackman 'Avengers' episode a few years before this date, there were plenty of good shots of him to use.
Jeremy Young had obviously been in the first Doctor Who story playing the caveman Kal two years before, but his appearance was not what I wanted for Mission. He was also in an episode of Space 1999 wearing a space suit, but there simply weren't enough shots of him to use from that. In the end I found an episode of Doomwatch that he had been in, which gave me enough good material.
Barry Jackson's character has only quite a small part in Mission before he becomes a Varga plant, so I used shots of him from his previous Doctor Who role as Ascaris, the mute assassin in the Romans.
I had managed to track down copies of the original set photos taken by the BBC design department, generously given to me by a private collector. From these I was able match up the correct background sets for each scene. It was really useful to have pictures of the Spaceship interior and the distress rocket to use.
Now that I had suitable costumes and faces for all the characters and backgrounds to put them against, I could start to make up the pictures.
The composites were made up using Photoshop, a shot at a time, to match the camera directions in the original camera script. This took literally months of work. Each shot generally consisted of three layers, the background 'set', the costume and the face. All these needed to be blended together to look like one picture. Some of the more complex composites had up to seven different layers. Some pictures took literally hours to prepare and would be on screen for less than a second.
The first shot of Mission is actually the reprise from the end of Galaxy 4, showing the jungle and seeing Garvey on the ground. This scene had to be completed for inclusion in our Galaxy 4 recon and so was done in advance of most of the work on Mission.
The Dalek pictures used were mostly from either The Chase or The Daleks' Master Plan, as the Daleks in these stories were identical and featured similar jungle or control room backgrounds in many cases.
There is always a problem with monsters that have no mouths knowing which one is talking, which is the reason the Daleks' lights flashed as they talked. This was okay for moving footage, but I was stuck again for what to do using only still pictures. I therefore decided that I would have to make the lights 'flash' on the recon. That meant for every picture of a Dalek used I had to make another one with the dome lights 'on' (the picture was brightened in those areas). I then had to insert short bursts of the 'lit' version of each picture over the unlit version to fit in with each syllable of the Dalek voices. This was really done by just trial and error until it fitted with the soundtrack.
Where appropriate I used video clips of the Daleks from other stories. Again, I tried to get the lights in sync with the soundtrack if at all possible. This was obviously much more difficult with moving video than stills. I had to play around with the speed of each clip and sometimes even run it backwards for short segments for the light flashes to fit the soundtrack.
The scenes with the alien delegates were actually very easy to do. There were quite a lot of pictures available for this and as the aliens didn't really do much, they weren't really a problem.
One of the hardest scenes to reconstruct was the one in which the dead Garvey is seen to transform into a Varga plant. First off his 'dead' hand is seen to twitch and then turn over to reveal the Varga thorn and the fibrous tissue growing from it, in the next scene his legs are seen twitching, he gets up and the camera pans up to reveal the top half of his body has completely transformed into a Varga. I decided that these scenes would look best as specially filmed sequences. The 'hand' scene was very simple to do using the original Sontaran Experiment costume and a little make up. The full transformation was a little trickier. Dean filmed me in the costume thrashing my legs around, then rising and panned up my legs. I then made up a composite picture of a Varga plant and a still of my legs taken from the video footage. As the video footage is played and starts to pan up the legs, the picture cross-fades to a pan up the composite to reveal the Varga. I was very pleased with the way this shot came out.
There were a few other shots that we needed to film new material for too. Shots of the costumes in certain positions, holding wrenches, screwdrivers etc. The tape recorder prop was made up by Dean using dimensions given in a drawing of the distress rocket printed in Jeremy Bentham's Early Years book. Marc Cory's Space Security ID was obviously specially made, what is not obvious is that it is actually 'Marc Cory's' signature on the card. Actor Edward de Souza had signed an autograph for me in which he had written 'Marc Cory' in brackets below his name, so I scanned this and used it on the ID badge.
The shot of Cory getting exterminated was specially filmed too. I think it was the only shot that used my own Dalek prop, as I couldn't find a suitable angle from existing pictures.
When I was about half way through the reconstruction, Dean announced that he had managed to contact Edward de Souza and that he had agreed to help out with an introduction for the recon. I copied what I had done onto tape and Dean and I visited Edward at his London home in January 2000. He was most impressed with what we showed him and it jogged a few memories about the production, which he related in his introduction.
The reconstruction went through quite a few iterations before it was finished. Extra material was filmed to help illustrate scenes like Cory carrying the rocket, running through the jungle, standing over Garvey's body, holding up the Varga thorn etc. These added shots all helped to fine-tune the reconstruction.
Just as the final touches had been done to the recon and it was ready for release Dean had been busy contacting the other two actors featured in the story, Jeremy Young and Barry Jackson and arranging a get together. The reunion was held at Edward de Souza's house, it was the first time the three had met since the filming of Mission in 1965. We showed them the video of the finished recon, then filmed an interview with them. We had written out questions in advance, which they pulled out of a tin at random, so this kept the conversation flowing very well.
It was very gratifying to see their reaction to the reconstruction, they all agreed that it was a very good representation of the original. Edward's wife hadn't realised that the pictures were faked until we told her after she had finished watching the tape.
We hope that you will enjoy watching the reconstruction too.