SCARFWEARER MOVIES

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So here are some of the props I made:

I built a model of the dematerialization circuit that appeared in several of the third doctor's stories, (notably The Terror of the Autons, Day of the Daleks and the Three Doctors). The core is a wooden ball from a craft store, with four pieces of dowel. There are short sections of copper pipe and some disks made from MDF, held on with short carriage bolts. The springs are copper wire which I wound around a rod, with craft beads strung on wires between them. It's not bad, and was an acceptable prop for distance use. I actually made this a few years ago, and was finally able to use it in this movie.
I also needed a dematerialization circuit to 'steal' from the daleks' TARDIS (DARDIS), so I decided to invent something suggestive of daleks, but clearly a dematerialization circuit. So here's what I came up with. I used another wooden ball, but remembered the trouble I had getting the spokes evenly spaced last time, so I used four pieces of tubing to prototype the spacing. I drew around these on the ball and then sanded the centre ball with a belt sander until the sanding reached the rings. The rest of it is made with hardboard disks glued together in stacks.
The dalek bombs were made with polystyrene balls and cylinders of card. The card was stapled to wooden separator blocks. They were held onto the daleks with strips of card which tucked behind the slats in front of the mesh. I found that they tended to wobble, so I laced them all up with fishing line, which is invisible to the video camera at the resolution I was using, even close up.
The knife switch was actually built from scratch. I wanted to make a specific reference to the switch that the Third Doctor used in "Inferno" to jump-start the TARDIS console, and I held out little hope of actually finding such a thing today, let alone finding it suitably weathered. I routered around the edge of a piece of wood and cut some pieces of metal sheet with metal scissors to make the W-shaped contacts. I sprayed the wood with brown paint, rather than go through the elaborate process of wood-staining. I sprayed the metal parts with primer and gold paint and then lightly sprayed them with matt black paint to simulate electrical burn marks, and also to dull down the rather bright gold paint. The handle is from a paint roller and the terminals that Scarfwearer attaches the jump leads to are screw tops from tubes of food paste. The notice is spray-painted weathering over laser printed paper. The door control seen in the DARDIS was a polystyrene torus from the craft store which I sandwiched with hardboard disks, and painted silver.
The cardboard cutout dalek is a couple of pieces of left-over foam-core with 35 sheets of paper glued to it. I took a picture of one of the daleks and printed it large using MS Publisher.
I made up six flats from hardboard and 2x2 sticks, glued and screwed together. I cut a couple of sheets of 1/2" plywood into ellipses with a circular saw(! as my jigsaw broke!). With a sheet of hardboard cut into three, this made my dalek TARDIS exterior in the style of "The Chase". Later I reused these flats for both the interior corridors and also the walls of the dalek control room.
The dalek doorway (there was only one!) was a couple of adapted flats. The door was just a piece of wallboard painted silver that I either screwed to the back or tipped on its corner when opening the door. It was never pivoted or hinged. It was also only ever one-sided: it shots where it's used, I just turned it around.
For the control panels, I made up some very basic frames and then used two layers of hardboard for the controls. The decals that eventually appeared were just printouts from drawings on the computer.
The console was fairly straightforward. I noticed that the original in Dalek Masterplan appeared to have been held together with silver tape, so I used duct tape to hold the sloping panels together on mine. I borrowed the cover from my fourth doctor console for this. The tubes in the middle were cut on a table saw from the core of a roll of carpet. I had to cover the tiled floor in the workshop with four sheets of primer painted hardboard. At times in the movie you can see the seams.

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