Series XI/XII News: “Those boffins have hammered together a crate that can print in three dimensions?”

May 21, 2016 Alex News 0

News on Series XI/XII continues at a pace, and with the model shoot currently still ongoing, we’ve been given a further interesting look behind the scenes of the production, both in terms of what it shows and what it means for the way the model work is being carried out this time. While we’ve seen various tweets from Richard Naylor, Nathan Cubitt and Dan Kay about the shoot, the most recent comes from Doug, and this time features a photo of a very familiar looking leg.

While it’s not a technique that’s been used previously to make the models for the show, it’s use certainly doesn’t seem out of place, and it seems that it is being used alongside more traditional model making techniques as shown with the in progress shot of the bigature. Also, given this Starbug’s history of being crashed, set on fire and various other potentially model damaging activities, there would definitely be a logic to producing it with 3D printing to allow multiple identical copies of the same model to be produced easily.

Once again though, the combination of things like this and Richard Naylor’s tweet suggesting a drone may have been used for some form of shooting, there is an interesting mix at play of different techniques to capture the effects work this time around, and perhaps far more than on any previous series. We await to how how it will all come together, but from the few bits and pieces we’ve seen so far it seems the results might be rather good.

Finally, with all of the recent tweets to do with the model shoot, it’s been interesting to see a lot of co-ordination between the various social media outlets, with the previous picture of the Dwarf model from Dan Kay being tweeted by Red Dwarf HQ, UKTV Press Office, Dave and Baby Cow. Aside from the model shot though, the other thing that was also tweeted from all of these outlets was the following new variation on the Series XI logo.

Given the combination of the release of this gif and the increased Twitter buzz, we’d assume that we might start to see some more official pictures cropping up reasonably soon. By previous example, with Series X the first publicity shot of the cast was released in April and the first trailer appeared in July. While as we’ve said previously, this is by no means a definite marker to judge the time frame against, it gives us a rough idea of what we might be expecting.

We also wouldn’t be surprised however if this time around, the promotion was being held back a little later to ensure that the buzz doesn’t die down between it’s start and the series airing. One thing is for sure though and that’s that while we had no complaints with UKTV’s handling of the promotion of Series X (the vindalunar escapade aside), there seems to be a step up in the PR on last time to get all outlets promoting the show carefully and with the same voice which we are definitely pleased to see.