My friend and I were at the Convention today as press, here's a full rundown (including pictures and quotes). Spoilers for season 7 inside.
When we got there, we sorted out a sort of running of events, so first we went to the costume display which was pretty cool and basically featured all the monsters and characters (except Daleks, weirdly enough) and had little plaques describing each character. The "Harkness" of Captain Jack Harkness was blanked out because someone had missed out the K when they typed it. Anyway, that wasn't the most interesting thing so we went to the prosthetics display after that.
The prosthetics display had the guys from Millennium FX and one of the actors who wears the monster costume (he was called Rory), and that was pretty good because they described some of the problems they have with the costumes and how unpractical they can be. One of the stories they told was that with the Haths' bubbly mouth-things in "The Doctor's Daughter", the director wanted it to bubble for every syllable they spoke. So they thought they were being clever by hooking up compressed air lens cleaner canisters and spraying them for every syllable. That worked well until they realised that it had other gases in it that the actors were having to breath in as they were setting the whole thing up, which meant that when it came to actually filming, the actors were really dizzy and had to act through it. After the prosthetics, we went to the Meet the Stars panel.
Meet the Stars had Matt, Karen, Arthur, Steven and Carole (the exec producer) and started with a general trailer of the series, then they cut in some clips at different points throughout the introduction bit. I have an audio recording of the whole session which I might be able to upload somewhere if anyone wants it, but other than that I'll just pick out a few bits of the question and answer session (the main part).
Matt was describing something to do with Doctor Who and said "Doctor Ho" instead and looked absolutely petrified and then promptly shut up for a while because he was so embarrassed (Freudian slip, anyone?).
Moffat just answered any leading questions with "No" or some other very sharp cut off, although he was quite funny when talking about other things.
Karen was fidgety as usual, and spend a lot of time fiddling with her hair.
A little kid asked Matt how to make a sonic, and instead of just dismissing it as a kid-question like the audience expected, he went into full Doctor-mode and started talking about taking "bits and bobs" and putting them into the heart of the TARDIS, which would then "atomise" it and send it through a paintjob which would go "brwwwwghhhhhh" (hand movements included) and then pop out. He got a full round of applause at the end and I think that it would convince anyone who was still doubtful that he's great for the Doctor.
When talking about filming, Karen mentioned that she (and Arthur, I think) had spent most of yesterday filming upside down. She also said her costume had some new jeans, and Matt mentioned he had been wearing thermals while shooting in Spain and had been on a horse (which we actually saw footage of later).
Next we had a panel of the people involved in the episode "The Girl Who Waited", which, to be perfectly honest, wasn't particularly interesting. It was good and we have the audio of that too, so I'll link it when I upload it.
We went and sat in on the recovered episodes session while we were eating our lunch but we didn't manage to catch much of it, so I can't say much about that really. After that we headed to the Special Effects demonstration which was really cool but again didn't have much in the way of actual information.
Somehow we ended up where people were getting autographs and basically asked if we could take pictures because we were press, so we got ushered right to the front and got to stand and take pictures right next to Arthur for a while, and then we went to the private Press Q&A session. While we were waiting in the press room, the cast were getting to watch the world premiere of the Season 7 trailer (comes out publicly on Monday, I believe, and we saw it later on), so they came in buzzing from that. After a bit of a quiet start, it loosened up a bit and Matt and Arthur were joking a lot. Moffat cut off any questions that were vaguely to do with spoilers, but he did say that the picture we've seen of Jenna-Louise is not her in costume, and he refused to confirm or deny whether she was from Earth. We have a slightly worse quality audio of that session which we're going to transcribe over the next few days, I think.
After that it was to the Doctor Who Uncut panel for us to get a chance to see the trailer and listen to Moffat (and some others) answering more questions - there was a jovial atmosphere in the audience so it was actually really funny to listen to. I'll describe the trailer in a minute, but first of all I'll do a highlights of the question and answer session. We were tired by this point so we forgot to record it, but I'm sure someone else will have it on youtube soon.
Someone asked Moffat about a Sherlock/Who crossover, and after a loud applause, Moffat said that first of all, the Doctor and Sherlock would just end up punching each other, and secondly that the idea of aliens and stuff would screw up all of Sherlock's previous theories, as he'd have to include time-travel and aliens as possibilities. Props to him for answering it decently.
He declined to give any real information about season 7 except that the cast got their scripts for episode 5 (Amy and Rory's departure), and it's being filmed as part of the same block as episode 1 (the one they're filming now). It involves weeping angels, "not everyone gets out alive" and it's in New York (I recall seeing a Keanu Reeves meme on here about the Statue of Liberty being a giant weeping angel a while ago, and that's what I thought of when he mentioned New York).
Again, he didn't give anything away about Jenna other than what's already been said and what was given earlier (basically that they wouldn't say whether she was human, from earth, alien or anything).
Now onto the trailer, the trailer was epic. I'm putting this in spoiler tags in case anyone read the rest but doesn't want to know the trailer. Considering they've been shooting something like two weeks now, I'm ridiculously impressed by it. [spoiler](/s "It featured clips from the Western-style episode that they filmed in Spain, including Amy facing the Doctor in what looked like a shoot off, shooting the ground and then someone telling her to drop the gun, the Doctor on a horse, them walking into a Western-style town, the Doctor talking to a typical barmaid person and a shot of a guy saying the Lord's prayer (actually, that was what it opened with). These started to cut in with what looked to me to be a snowscape, and then clips of aliens who had captured someone and were holding them captive, by the looks of things. These were all cutting in and out of each other and then we hear the Doctor saying "I'd prefer Daleks" (or something similar) while he's lying on desert sands, then it cut to a Dalek eye-scope coming out of the snow, looking quite badly damaged but still alive." )
We did lots of other things inbetween each of the panels, including talking to other press people, playing Eternity Clock (it's really good!), and just generally enjoying ourselves as Whovians. I'm absolutely exhausted at the minute thanks to travel and lack of sleep, so I apologise for the quality of this post, but if anyone has questions about anything then I can try to answer it? Also, I was there for zCint, so we'll have some stuff up there about it which might be more literate, and we're going to podcast about it soon.
Edit: Trying to sort out the spoiler code but it hates me and I forgot to upload the pictures but I'll get them up asap! (Hotel internet, phones and sleep deprivation have broken my brain). Also, we're probably not podcasting it because I keep losing sanity every time we start recording.
Posted Mar 24, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC · edited