The Girl from Tomorrow (TV series)

[IdiotBoxBooks]

Hi. We’re giving some thought as to whether or not we should do stretch goals and – if we did – what they might include. Will keep you updated.

Thanks.

[Тусеня]

Huuuuurrrrraaaaay!!!
Although I am not a fan of this franchise, I am still incredibly happy that everything finally worked out! There will be a third book!
My heartfelt congratulations to the fans of the franchise and everyone involved.

[Fanat]

Hi everyone, I just want to let you all know that they announced a STRETCH GOAL. Now the target is £12.5k. If it is reached, those ordering a hard copy of A New Tomorrow get an extra postcard, and those ordering The Tomorrow Trilogy physical box set get all five.

Please note that I'm not affiliated with this campaign.

[Zoe Isn't A Dog]

Hi. We’re giving some thought as to whether or not we should do stretch goals and – if we did – what they might include. Will keep you updated.

Thanks.

Do you by any chance have a Digitalspy Forum account?

https://forums.digitalspy.com/categorie ... fi-fantasy

[Zoe Isn't A Dog]

Does anyone have something they really want to see happen in the new book?

[Fanat]

Does anyone have something they really want to see happen in the new book?

I would say that I have no specific requests for the plot and content of the third book. Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson are absolutely outstanding authors, and I am confident that they will write an exceptionally interesting and captivating book anyway.

***

IdiotBoxBooks, could you please tell me how you created all these wonderful TGFT animations for your YouTube videos? The text font, the sphere with electric-like "hair" dancing around it, and some other things look like exactly from the original TV series. Did you use AI to produce it?

[IdiotBoxBooks]

Hi, thanks for the kind words.

This is probably more information than you wanted, but...

The capsule was built as a 3D model from scratch. Here is is in all its glory. Using lots of screen references and the plans. The first challenge was to get all the diagonals going in the right direction (the real prop seemed to follow no logic as to the order of the diagonals). That started with a paper model so we could understand the flat plan:



Then came the modelling:



And finally the finished render:



From that we rendered the capsule spinning a few rotations of 360 degrees, built a digital matte painting of the science dome set, and looped the footage so it gets ever faster then disappears. Then we had to match the VFX as close as we could. In the show, the capsule gets ever bluer and brighter as it's about to take off which was easy enough to copy. Then we added some electricity effects. The hardest thing to replicate is the 'static' the capsule and transducers give off in the original. The easiest way I've found to replicate these things is usually to think 'how would they have done this originally?', which, given it's 1990, narrows down the options a little. In the end, I discovered they probably took footage of noise / static (the kind of thing you used to see on analogue tvs when your aerial wasn't tuned in, masked it, then overlayed it onto the footage using a blending mode ('screen' from memory if anyone's interested). The only thing I couldn't match was the explosion. Anyone who knows their GFT and TE will know that EVERY SINGLE capsule journey recycled the same footage of an explosion. It's a very particular type that's quite distinctive (like something being pulled in two horizontally like a cracker). The quality of the video masters is just too low to isolate it without the original footage, and try as I might I couldn't find any stock effects that matched it. So we had to go with a brand new effect, which looks a bit like a shockwave.

The titles were also really difficult. Though people can sometimes be a bit disparaging about the effects in GFT and TE, they're actually VERY ahead of their time in many cases. It was not commonplace to see some of this on screen in 1990, not in Aus, the UK or USA, especially not with their budget. It's no surprise that many of the effects people on the series went on to have Hollywood careers! The opening titles are a good example of this. First of all, I had to recreate the two logos in 2D and make a third for TE. This wasn't easy as I couldn't find the exact font used (try as a I might). So I had to recreate it. That looked like this:



Then it was time to animate it in After Effects. Making the 3D Letters and matching the look and feel was easy enough. It's the movement that's tricky. They would have probably used some early software that would have automated the 'explosion' (e.g. random placement). There are still scripts that do this today, but they don't move or act the same, so we had to manually do it to get it as close as we could. Also, if you've ever noticed, it's quite a sophisticated effect. There are actually two sets of letters for each character, one set which is gold at the 'front' and another set which is mirrored at the back with a black front and dark gold sides. The two 'come together' in the animation, then explode apart. This had to be done in two separate passes. Then lighting effects added to make it look gold.




The 'power' effect used on the opening and closing credits was also tricky. Again the existing footage wasn't high enough quality to use, but it was fairly obviously footage they'd shot of a van de Graaf power generator. So I found some that was similarish, played around with it, and changed the colours / vibrancy until it was a close enough fit.

The serif font used for captions was matched entirely. For anyone interested, it's called Korinth.

That's about it. Any more questions, let me know.
Thanks, Dave.

[Zoe Isn't A Dog]

That's about it. Any more questions, let me know.
Thanks, Dave.

You're extremely talented. Very impressive work. A lot of integrity there. Thank you for not just relying on AI. Please could you share the Time Capsule plans? I believe they were posted here before, but the image is now gone.

[Fanat]

This is probably more information than you wanted, but...

IdiotBoxBooks, I'm speechless! It's absolutely fantastic!

[Fanat]

Please could you share the Time Capsule plans? I believe they were posted here before, but the image is now gone.

These plans are available here again now.