The Making of The Massacre
By Dean Rose

Derek had done a great amount of the early development work on Massacre. He had gained permission to use a lot of the original source material from a private collector in early 1999. Then followed this with early testing of composite material through 1999 and early 2000 (whilst simultaneously concentrating on other reconstructions). A 'rough cut' version of most of War of God was available by November 2000 (to coincide with our meeting with Donald Tosh). However, with the increasing demands of editing the highly desired colour Marco Polo, Derek handed over much of the responsibility of Massacre to Rick and myself. From late 2000 I turned to full time development of composite material for Massacre getting quite carried away at times even taking time off work to concentrate on particularly difficult scenes.

As I became more and more familiar with Photoshop I experimented with surprising success at some quite ambitious composites. As I completed a set of composites I would email batches of them to Derek and Rick for review. Rick then pressed ahead with the reconstruction development in Mediastudio, constantly providing me with lists of requirements. I had to be extremely creative to see the opportunity of where I could obtain material for some of these composites.

Rick's pressing demands really accelerated the production. I would normally turn his requests around very quickly. Rick felt compelled to edit the new material into the recon as soon as he could which would usually result in a new list of requirements. This cycling affect began to snowball and we soon found that each of us was driving the progress of the other. Throughout Priest of Death and Bell of Doom production definitely accelerated.

We knew that one of the most difficult scenes was going to be depicting the attempted assassination of the Admiral. We had limited authentic material for the Admiral, played by Leonard Sachs, and didn't want to explain the scene away with lots of captions. Images of a gun barrel and the view looking along a gun barrel towards the aiming eye of the assassin helped to supplement this scene, which was beautifully edited together by Rick. Rick was able to edit the scene in such a way that it builds the suspense as Bondot waits for his target. Screen captures of Leonard Sachs in awkward positions (for example as he dresses himself in Elizabeth R) were used in composites to make it look like he was doubling over in pain after being shot by the assassin Bondot.

The final episode featured a montage of pictures of The Massacre displayed over the sounds of carnage and haunting incidental music. This was covered by a variety of suitable pictures found in textbooks from various libraries and prints from the British Museum. Clever editing from one gory scene to another gave the impression of the carnage of the massacre. This too is in line with references in the camera script.

The camera scripts described that the opening story title and the closing 'Next Episode' captions were superimposed over a print of 16th century Paris. Scrutinising one of the Design department set photographs we noticed that the print could be seen leaning against one of the sets in front of one of the cameras (in fact it was leaning against the door of Preslin's shop). Unfortunately the photograph was not clear enough to zoom in on the picture sufficiently to use it in the reconstruction. Although very blurred, it was possible to make out the general appearance of the print. After many hours of searching through books and the internet, we were unable to track the down the picture.

As the reconstruction was nearing completion, one of the UK Loose Cannon dub sites (Simon Simmons) was planning to do some research work at the British Museum so Derek had sent him a copy of the picture and asked him to look out for it, but in all honesty not really holding out much hope for such a difficult task. Then just as the final edits were being done to the recon, Simon contacted us to say he had found what he thought was the correct print and had ordered a copy. We were absolutely delighted to hear this news and the picture was included to make the recon even more authentic.