The Time Monster with New VFX (Classic Doctor Who)

0:00 Intro

0:10 The Vase and the Teacup

I went for quite a light-touch approach for the TOMTIT machine and opted for a subtle effect for the dematerialisation and rematerialisation of the objects, rather than having distracting glowing beams coming from the machine or anything

0:41 The High Priest

Krasis' appearance uses a different effect from the later appearance of Kronos, and, since there was no way of me being able to mask it out, I chose to just embrace it and enhance it with some volumatreic effects

0:56 The De-ageing

The original de-aging effect for Stuart had a couple of issues - firstly, each of the three shots were out of sync (which was common for these kinds of effects) and secondly, it didn't actually look like he was de-aging at all as the last shot still contained lots of wrinkles from the prosthetics.
So as well as trying to get each shot to sync-up better I made his hair much greyer in the first shot and added more saturation to his skin and hair in the final shot

1:05 Kronos summoned

Terrance Dicks' novelisation describes Kronos appearing as a "blazing white light", so that's what I went for. My main aim in these shots was to try to obscure Kronos' feet as much as possible, because it's these that make his appearance much less bird-like and much more guy-in-a-bird-costume-like.

1:49 The Master's watch

The Master seems to operate his watch by twiddling dials on its side, as you would to tune in an old CRT, so I added scanlines and distortion effects to suggest the watch is somehow "tuning in" to the images displayed.

2:06 The Time vortex

What's odd about the time vortex in The Time Monster is that it looks completely different the two times it appears. The one seen on the TARDIS monitor is a bright red swirl (not dissimilar from the swirls on the opening credits) and later it's visible as a kind of blue/cyan pattern behind the Doctor and Master's TARDISes. So I created a kind of swirling tunnel effect that includes shades of cyan, blue and a dark red that I used in all of its appearances.

2:20 Benton baby

Again, a different effect, not used on any of the previous TOMTIT scenes, is used when poor Benton gets babyfied. And, as I wasn't able to mask the effect, I chose to enhance it with a mixture of dark and light glow effects and had the effects move up his body from his exposed hand.

2:28 TARDIS separation

While I could have added practically anything to the background, once I'd masked the two TARSISes, I wanted to have something that at least vaguely resembled the original backdrop. So I created a "vortex" that both resembled the common time-tunnel we've seen a million times, and that matches the colour and shape of the original backdrop. It also needed to look somehow authentic to the period so I avoided more "modern" effects like lens flares or anything too fancy.

2:42 Destruction of Atlantis

Not much to say about this other than it's a shame I couldn't have added effect footage of the wider destruction of Atlantis that was taking place.

2:56 The void

The novelisation describes the void as "complete nothingness" and originally I planned to have the background completely white (a bit like Warriors' Gate) but Jo describes the void as "groovy" which contains a suggestion of the original rainbow colours, so I stuck with the colours.

3:33 The Return of Kronos

Again, I kept things simple here with a slight glow to Kronos' face and a more interesting appearance effect.