Roles:
- Producer
- Director
- Writer (Audio Adaptation)
- Actor
The wolves are running. Perhaps you could do something to stop their bite?
In late 2017, during my first year of university, I found myself with a sudden deal of free time, due to now living away from my family and not having much in the way of coursework coming in.
Feeling a little homesick, I decided to revisit an old family Christmas tradition - watching the BBC's 'The Box of Delights'.
This tradition is one repeated every year at Christmas by some of my family, but in the past few years leading up to 2017, I had not joined in for repeat viewings of the story, being so incredibly familiar with it by that point that re-viewing it had started to become somewhat stale.
As I was rewatching 'box' again, the memories attached to the story came flooding back, and so did the incredible incidental score by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
After just the first episode, I had to grab my laptop, open up Garageband and begin tinkering.
I produced a very crude version of the opening theme and some of the incidental music. It was this which sparked a thought in my mind. A thought that was partially inspired by the Doctor Who audio dramas by Big Finish, which I had discovered the year before - "I bet I could make 'box' on audio."
I got to work transcribing the television series into script and adjusting visual cues and other parts which would make no sense on audio so that the script would work in the new format. I also added a couple of new scenes in places to help with the script's flow.
Once the script was completed, I opened a casting call and set the incredibly ambitious goal of completing the six episodes for release on YouTube weekly in the build up to Christmas 2017, starting with the 33rd anniversary of episode 1's original TV broadcast and finishing on Christmas Eve.
Recording the story was somewhat chaotic. The actors were not all cast at the same time, and so each character was recorded separately from one another, with the actor who was originally cast as Kay bowing out at the last minute. This caused quite a major panic and made me scramble to find a replacement. Thankfully, Joe Gibbons stepped in to take over the role of Kay and did a tremendous job at it too!
Unfortunately, due to the rush that had led to Joe's casting as Kay, there was no time to organise a recording session in person, so we ended up recording Kay's lines for episode 1 over a Facebook call, where Joe was on his phone, on the day the first episode was due to go out, leading to a distinctly low quality sound - as one viewer noted, joking that Kay had been played by C3P0.
Looking back, it's quite amazing that the thing was even made given how rushed everything was, but thankfully the episode was completed in time for release, which would have been great had it not been for my student halls' internet, which crashed, leaving my unable to release the first episode until the day after.
In the week leading to episode 2's release, Joe and I hastily organised a recording session and got his lines for all 6 episodes done in high quality, so that I could eventually come back and remaster episode 1 with the better quality voice lines.
The average week's production for an episode of 'box' was incredibly packed.
Even though all the actors' dialogue was recorded, putting each episode together was a monumental task.
As each actor had been recorded separately, every single scene had to be stitched together from multiple tracks of dialogue, picking the best takes of each only to discover that a different take worked better with the other actor's dialogue. It was a mess.
On top of all of that, I also had to construct the soundscape for each episode with footsteps, weather, fireplaces crackling, etc and re-create all the incidental music from ear.
The fact that any episodes where produced within the space of 1 week each seems insane to me now, and I have no idea how on Earth I managed it.
Unfortunately, come episode 3, things had become too difficult to balance. My university work to be done before Christmas had started to pile up and I no longer had the time to dedicate to 'box'.
The series was put on hiatus, and would eventually be finished with a much more staggered release over the course of 2018, starting in June and eventually wrapping up with episode 6 releasing just before Christmas 2018. The remaster of episode 1 eventually released, alongside the free digital download, in March 2019.
I felt that the way the TV series ended was far too subtle for audio and there was no easy way to adapt it, so I, instead, opted for re-writing the final scene entirely for something that would have far more impact without visuals. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of removing the open-endedness and room for interpretation of the original ending.
A number of other projects were teased and announced after episode 6's broadcast which I had intended to go on to produce through 2019 and 2020, and some progress had been made on a potential adaptation of C.S. Lewis' 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe', however the COVID-19 pandemic blew all plans for it out of the water, and after some time pondering about these 3 projects' futures, I decided the only suitable course of action, at that time, was to cancel them indefinitely. Though I would definitely like to revisit them at some point.
Title Sequence
One thing I was very keen on having for my adaptation was a title sequence in a similar vein to those used on the original BBC series.
I created these titles using After Effects and a series of manipulated photos. Some of these photos were the actors in the piece, while others included a wolf, a mouse and a Mr Punch puppet.
The titles also included a 3D CGI model of the Box of Delights which was kindly donated to me by a friend, for use in the series.
I had originally approached Anthony Motto, who I have used for a number of other 3D CGI services, but he was too busy to be able to provide a model for this sequence, though he did provide the version used on the actual release, which came out in 2019.
The Box of Delights Appreciation Society
After the release of episode 1 on YouTube, someone reached out to me on Twitter.
We had a short talk and they, very kindly, told me how they had enjoyed the first episode. As the conversation went on, they asked if I was aware of a Facebook group called 'The Box of Delights Appreciation Society'. Apparently my new adaptation had been making a little bit of noise in that group, which is packed full of 'box' super-fans. I was, to say the least, rather surprised that my tiny fan-project had apparently been noticed.
I joined the group and was even more surprised to see a number of posts discussing my adaptation, with some people asking, about the trailer, if this was a new professional adaptation and others correcting them that this was merely a fan-project.
I spent some time in that group with some rather wonderful people who gave me a lot of feedback and support with my little project which significantly helped to boost my confidence with it, and I've no doubt that the members of The Box of Delights Appreciation Society played a significant role in my drive to complete the story.
So I definitely owe some of the success of this project to them.
Thank you 'box' fans!
