Available to stream and now also on physical media, The War Games in Colour subtracts 140 minutes from the original runtime but adds colour to one of the most crucial stories of the Doctor Who classic era from 1969. Kevin Hilton talks to the team that used Adobe Premiere Pro and other tools to complete it.
In science fiction, someone crossing their own timeline or interacting with other versions of themselves is considered a 'bad thing'. This is something the Doctor, the lead protagonist of the long-running BBC TV series Doctor Who, knows only too well. It doesn't stop him doing it, though. And in the real world, the various incarnations and eras of the Time Lord from the last 62 years co-exist, with this year seeing the 20th anniversary of the rebooted 'Nu Who' era and also the second season of the BBC's partnership with Disney+ on the franchise.
The 'classic' era (1963-1996) is also represented, with most surviving or animated episodes available on the BBC iPlayer streaming platform. These include the new, colourised, feature-length version of The War Games, retitled The War Games in Colour, also recently released on DVD and Blu-ray. This reworking of the 1969 serial continued the trend for colourising selected black and white stories, which began in 2023 (the 60th anniversary) with the seminal 1963 First Doctor story The Daleks.
Even before work on The Daleks in Colour was completed there was talk of a follow-up, with a Second Doctor story being a favourite for the colourisation and feature edit treatment. While The Daleks is significant because it introduced an enduring adversary for the Doctor, The War Games is notable for being the end of actor Patrick Troughton's tenure in the role (although he would later make three guest reappearances) and naming the alien race to which the character belongs as the Time Lords.
"During the summer of 2023, when I had done the edit on The Daleks and it was about 70% colourised, BBC4 saw what we'd been working on and were impressed enough to commission a second one several months before the first one aired," comments Benjamin Cook, who edited both projects. "That was a huge vote of confidence but also terrifying, because we chose to do the longest surviving story, with ten episodes, after doing the second longest, which is seven episodes. We didn't make it easy for ourselves.”
Committed Whovian Cook edited the project on Adobe Premiere Pro and, when considering how to structure the edited story and what to remove, knew there would be a proportion of the potential audience that was not familiar with the original serial, while another group would know it almost by heart. "We've cut about two thirds out of The War Games to make it fit the 90-minutes time slot and used almost every second to get everything we could from the story," he says. "It's very intricately plotted, which made it a nightmare to edit, although joyous as well. It's a unique challenge for an editor because, usually, people do not know what was taken out but in this case some viewers realise there's something missing.”
The colourisation team was also made up of Doctor Who enthusiasts who had previously made fan videos converting black and white clips of the show to colour. One such hobbyist is Rich Tipple (above), who, like Cook, is also a video production professional and was asked to oversee the colourising aspects of both The Daleks and The War Games. For the first of these Tipple was joined by fellow colourists and fans Kieran Highman, Scott Burditt and Timothy K Brown but realised that for the follow-up additional artists would be required.
"Kieran and I went seamlessly from The Daleks to The War Games, creating palettes and doing pre-production work," he says. "I knew we needed to grow the team, so in addition to Kieran, Scott, Tim and myself we were able to get the services of Aaron J Climas and Tom Newsom. Aaron worked on his own scenes, while Tom partnered up with Tim, who did a lot of the keyframes for a particular shot. Tom would then go in and stretch that colour over as many seconds as he could.”
Tipple, Highman and Climas worked on Adobe After Effects, with Burditt and Brown using Photoshop, while Newsom was on Premiere Pro. All the artists were able to match to colour photographs taken during the original production, which Tipple describes as "massively beneficial." By coincidence, much of the location filming took place in parts of East Sussex, near where Tipple now lives, which meant he was familiar with the colours of the local countryside.
The major difference between the colourisation of The Daleks and that of The War Games, Tipple points out, was the quality of the source footage. "This time it had at least 100% more image detail in each frame," he explains. " By comparison, The Daleks was not only a low quality film print but a lot of the backgrounds were painted boards, which made us push the colour harder than we might have normally. Whereas, with The War Games, the detail was so good you could go in and really carefully apply [colours].”
The War Games is significant both as the Second Doctor's last story and for the fact that his regeneration into the Third Doctor is not shown on-screen. The final episode fades out on Patrick Troughton's face spinning into the void but we do not see him change into his successor, Jon Pertwee. This was because Pertwee's casting had not been officially confirmed, meaning the new Doctor was not seen until the beginning of Season 7 in 1970.
Benjamin Cook calls this "one of Doctor Who's great missing scenes", adding that the new version of The War Games gave the opportunity to finally fill in that gap. "Fans like nothing more than filling in little gaps in the canon and continuity," he says. "While the scans of the episodes were being done, I started to look at other episodes we could possibly use to construct a regeneration sequence. I was about two weeks off starting the edit when a fan from Australia, Jacob Booth, uploaded a YouTube video that created the kind of regeneration scene we were planning, using footage from other episodes with VFX work, CGI and rotoscoping through a combination of Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop. Russell T Davies saw it as well and we agreed that we wouldn't be able to do anything much better, so we decided to contact Jake and ask if he wanted to work with us.”
Cook also used this new version of The War Games to reference a fan theory that had been circulating since the 1980s; that the character of the War Chief (played by Edward Brayshaw) is the Master, the renegade Time Lord who would become a regular adversary of the Doctor during the Pertwee era and continue to appear sporadically into the modern iteration.
During the edit, Cook used two temp tracks, The Master's Theme by Dudley Simpson from the Third Doctor serial The Mind of Evil (1971) and The Master Vainglorious by Murray Gold from the Tenth Doctor episode Utopia (2007), to suggest the connection. Mark Ayres, the sound designer/mixer and composer of additional music for the feature version, recognised what Cook was saying and incorporated the pieces into the final mix. "I re-recorded Dudley's cue because the original track didn't quite sync {with the pictures]," he says. "But apart from tweaking the edit slightly on The Master Vainglorious to fit the cut slightly better, it's as Ben had laid it in. And yes, the music is saying 'This is the Master’."
The War Games in Colour was mostly well received, although, as was to be expected, some sections of the fandom saw it as a debasement of the original story. But, as Benjamin Cook concludes, " The [existing] black and white episodes are still available and get so much love. These colour versions aren't supposed to replace the original. They free us up to do things differently and have a bit of fun."