PLEASE NOTE: After serious discussions with Steve Roberts, this idea was considered to be currently unfeasable, many due to the lack of visual data - but the Who3D group were already working on a solution...

However, there have been ideas from this, which is what I wanted, and now YOU can have your say...

Click the link below to see the Next Phase of The Project...

This idea may sound radical (maybe even insane), and expensive. And currently, it probably would be too expensive for the BBC to consider. But 10 years ago, the idea of using a computer to re-colourise Black and White copies of Jon Pertwee stories seemed to expensive to be realised. Today, had the BBC2 repeats continued, a budget could have gone so far as to have paid for that treatment, which a decade before seemed unreachable.

At this time (April 2000), the Hollywood industry and software companies have proved computer effects, through digital development, can produce additional elements in a frame that look as real as the physical elements shot in that frame. So the quality of these Computer Generated Images (CGI) has proved to be of near-visual perfection. And now, the effects house, Manex, has developed it to a level where photographs can be rendered to look like shot footage. And given that none of these missing episodes require "flo-mo" to the extreme level of The Matrix, 3-Dimensionalising the telesnaps would seem to be simpler.

What makes this hard is that, unlike The Matrix, the telesnaps are NOT a "frame by frame" guide to the episode's content, so therefore, a lot of time and effort would be required constructing the elements in between.
However, it's not just guesswork; the BBC still hold shooting and set scripts, which give the structure of shots, scenes and so forth, while the audio soundtracks that exist can give the Episode Renderers clues as to the timing of these shots.

Also, to do it this way would allow the computers the chance to clean up the picture quality of the telesnaps, using the quality of the surviving clips as a guide. And if it looks to clear, then they can always add a fuzziness to the picture for that authentic look!

However, other questions are then raised; would you like to have these episodes in their original format of Black and White or if possible, colourise them as if they where the originally shot as such? I believe, for now, that if such a reconstruction were undertaken, they should be restored to Black and White first.

Seriously thought, this alternative seems like the only, viable way of restoring the lost catalogue of Doctor Who episodes.

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