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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

RTS Award Win for Neill Gorton's Millennium FX

The Royal Television Society Design & Craft Innovation Award goes to Neill Gorton and the team behind the prosthetics for Little Britain and Dr Who!

The following is quoted from http://www.rts.org.uk

“This winning team have worked across many genres in our industry but in the past year have been particularly responsible for two quite different and highly successful shows.

In 2004, the producers of the comedy show Little Britain came to the prosthetics team with the challenge of coming up with a convincing Fat Make-up for Matt Lucas to play the part of Bubbles de Vere. This resulted in the hilarious fat suit that was such a success in series 2 of Little Britain. For 2005, the bar was raised even higher. Not only did the suit have to be taken off and put on again the next day, but, learning from the previous year's experience, it had to be ventilated so that Matt could wear it all day long without collapsing from heat exhaustion. Our winners designed a system of running iced water to cool Matt down which worked very successfully. But this was just the beginning. It was decided that Bubbles de Vere would be joined by a new character called Desiree to be played by David Walliams. She would be as fat as Bubbles, but twice as tall...and black. Many of you will have seen the results on screen and I am sure will agree that the challenge was more than adequately met.

In the same year a BBC drama was being shot in Cardiff which also required significant input and innovation from the prosthetics team. The fabulous creations designed and produced by our recipient are a major contribution to the successful return of Doctor Who to our screens. Our team, with their amazing imagination and consummate skill were the perfect choice to realise the weird and wonderful creatures encountered by The Doctor. Millions of children across the world owe their nightmares to our recipients - a fact which we suspect they relish!

Doctor Who is a relentless machine, as a show it eats people’s creativity - in the last three years we have pushed this team to their limits and they have never let us down. The Doctor Who producers tell us that they are delighted that this talented, hardworking genius of a team are being recognised tonight.”

Congratulations to Neill and his team!

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Torchwood, Dr Who and GEOS

I received the following email today regarding the Global Episode Opinion Survey...

---
The Global Episode Opinion Survey (GEOS) is a worldwide episode
survey of nearly 90 current and classic genre TV shows. The aim of
the survey is to determine the average score of each episode for a
series as determined by fans.

There are currently over 11,000 registered voters participating in
the survey. Results are also broken down by season, as well as
different demographics such as age of each GEOS member, sex, and
country of origin.

It is known to us that writers and producers of the shows often use
GEOS to gauge how storylines have been received by fans.

Torchwood (and the new Doctor Who) is a recent addition to GEOS, and
while fan interest is high, participation in the survey has been slow
to gain momentum. A message of support and a link to us on your web
site would encourage fan participation and ensure the Survey results
have some meaning. The URL is:

http://www.geos.tv/

We appreciate any support you can provide Torchwood in the Survey.
---

So, go and check out the Doctor Who and Torchwood pages and remember to vote! I know I will...

http://www.geos.tv/index.php/index/tor
http://www.geos.tv/index.php/index/dw2

Friday, November 10, 2006

Any moment now...

The new version of Kopic's Dr Who and Torchwood News Service is almost ready for launch. Any time now... As soon as I've done some backups and final tweaks! You'll now see Amazon UK _and_ Amazon US shops as well as a new eBay page which shows you the latest Doctor Who and Torchwood items that are up for sale on eBay UK. This will expand soon to include eBay US. I will also be working on shops and eBay listings for other countries in the not too distant future and also plan to have a "find the best DVD prices" search page.

It's all change around Kopic Towers! :-)

And Now For The News...