I'd meaning to make a film with the Daleks for a while, so here it is. It took about 6 months to make, and is just over 11 minutes long.

It's made entirely on a small digital still camera that was able to take 30 second video clips, which I edited and strung together.

Read below for The Making of Scarfwearer and the Daleks, which describes the props that I made for the film.

If you want to save a copy you can right-click on one of the files listed below:

Enjoy!

Title	Format	Size (MB)
Scarfwearer and the Daleks	MPEG 1	112
Scarfwearer and the Daleks	WMV	28

In contrast to my prior efforts, I built a lot of props and sets specially for this movie. 

I didn't want to spend too much money on it though, so I reused whatever I could, and ended up using a lot of scrap material and actually doing it for very little.

I'd previously built the daleks with the same colour scheme specifically so I could do some coherent (and at that point unplanned) filming with them.

The film itself makes many references to Doctor Who, and particularly to the dalek stories. I also reused a few sound effects, though a great many of the sound effects were produced using household objects and found sounds of various sorts. In fact most of the (hundreds of) sounds you hear in the movie were added during post production.

So here are some of the props I made:

Dematerialization Circuit

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.

Dalek Dematerialization Circuit

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.

Dalek Bombs

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.

Knife Switch and Door Control

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.

Cardboard Cutout Dalek

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. 

The DARDIS

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.

The DARDIS Control Panels

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 DARDIS Console

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.