I was up Monday night watching ABC2 and Dr Who was on. When I was a young'un I used to watch Dr Who when it was on ABC regular, in the days when it starred Tom Baker, the guy who does the voice over for Little Britain.

Anyway, the production values on Dr Who have sky rocketed. On Monday nights episode there was a distinct lack of silver painted cricket pads, but there was a CGI shriveled up Doctor. Following the episode ABC2 screened 'the making of' the episode. One of the visual effects guys spoke about how they created the full size to shriveled up transition effect which I found kind of interesting. If I'm interpreting what he described correctly, they basically filmed the actor for three minutes or so gyrating on the ground (looking like he was having a spasm) then went back in the editing suite and remove a whole slab of frames almost at random, to give the shot a frenetic transformation vibe. If I ever get hold of a video camera again I may try to reproduce something similar in After Effects. I looked for it on YouTube with no luck. It's the sort of effect that would be at home in a home made vampire flick or industrial music video.

Here's a more sedate type of effect (not as aggressive) that uses a bit of that stop go style animation. It's cool in its own right.

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