The Making of The Massacre
By Dean Rose

Historical stories are always favourites among the fans and The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve is no exception. Although being a rather obscure foreign historical event it nevertheless makes a rather interesting story. It was just a matter of time before we undertook the mammoth task of reconstructing The Massacre.

The Massacre is one of those stories about which very little detail is generally known, mainly due to the lack of available photos. Once we started to gather together the photos there were actually more than we thought - around 40 including all the set photos. Derek's usual networking skills again providing us with some rather unique and exclusive photos, courtesy of a private collector. Even with the exclusive material 40 photos was still obviously way short of the 70 photos per episode that would be the equivalent quantity used for a telesnap reconstructions, but it did at least give us a place to start. The first non-trivial task was to study each of the set photos and actually work out what they were photos of! This was actually a lot more difficult than we first thought. It was obvious what some of the set photos were showing, such as the tavern and some of the streets (The street sign for Rue de Bethisy could actually be seen in one of the set photos), but others were rather ambiguous. Where more than one set featured a desk and a chair it took some time to work out which was a set of Nicholas' room and which was of the Abbot's apartments. Fortunately some of the set photos were from original photographic negatives and had the filming dates written on the sleeve that held them. These dates could then be crossed checked against the trusty DWAS 'Production Guide Volume 2 - Filming schedules' and this helped to resolve some of the ambiguity. A process of elimination allowed us to finally identify all of the original sets.

The Massacre was the earliest full story soundtrack to be recorded and kept by audio recordist Graham Strong (he did record earlier stories, but did not keep the recordings). As such, the quality of the audio is very good indeed. However, during the latter half of the last episode atmospheric conditions in Graham's area meant that the volume fluctuates considerably in his original recording. When the BBC released their CD of The Massacre, Mark Ayres compensated for this fluctuation quite well, but annoyingly it can still be heard as a very prominent pulsation. As luck would have it, there were other people that recorded the story on its original transmission, most notably David Holman and Richard Landen. Although their recordings are generally not as clear as Graham's, they do not suffer the same volume fluctuations. Of the two, Richard Landen's recording seemed to be the best and so we used that version for the reconstruction of the final episode. Derek used combinations of the various audio sources to generate a re-mastered soundtrack. Most of the audio manipulation was performed in the Soundforge audio editing software.

As with all the reconstructions the camera scripts are an extremely useful item to have to hand when doing a reconstruction because they spell out exactly what was on screen at any particular point in the story, something that is not always clear from the audio alone. When telesnaps are not available the importance of the camera script becomes even more crucial for generating an accurate representation of the story. The Massacre camera scripts were not readily available in fan circles, so I made a trip to the BBC Written Archives at Caversham to obtain copies, a rather expensive trip, but well worth it. The camera scripts give so much detail about what would have been seen on the screen during transmission even down to the detail of the sort of shot used and what was shown on screen for each line of dialogue and even more usefully when there are long sequences without dialogue. For instance, if you just listen to the audio, the opening scene of the story appears to be the TARDIS materialising in a street. The camera script tells us that what was actually seen was a boy kicking a paper ball along the street and running away as he hears the TARDIS materialising behind a fence. So the Police Box prop was never actually seen in this story. Details like this would never be known without the camera script. Wherever possible we endeavour to reconstruct the stories to this level of detail.

Armed with all available authentic photos, a good soundtrack and a camera script, we still were far short of the material needed to reconstruct the story.