Rehearsals for the SVR Christmas Special

Thomas and his friends, Percy, Toby and James are very excited. Soon it will be time to start filming the Christmas Special so today they have all been out in the garden rehearsing their parts.

Thomas to the Rescue

Here is the latest Thomas the Tank Engine video from the Sandwell Valley railway film crew.

Thomas the Tank Engine's branch line takes him near to an old quarry in which there are a number of caves. One day a caver has a nasty fall and Harold is asked to transport him to hospital, but it's too foggy to land so Thomas has to come to the rescue.

The Making of Thomas to the Rescue

The initial idea for the story came from a discussion with G Scale Society members earlier this year. Much of the story is based on a nasty fall I had while caving on 1st November 2015 and what then happened to me on the day.

This was always going to be a highly experimental video as it required G Scale garden railway scenes to be blended with 12” to the foot action shots.

The first challenge was to make it look like the garden railway had a quarry as a backdrop. The background is from some drone footage I took in July last year and it is the quarry where the accident took place. The railway embankment is by the pond area in the garden and the finished effect was achieved by erecting a green screen behind the railway. The first goods train I filmed contained a green truck which had to be replaced with a red one.

The caving clips feature three caves in South Wales and were lifted from videos I had made over the last few years.

The story also required mist and fog effects and these were added in the edit by using ProFog from Pixel Studios.

The pictures of the injured caver and the stretcher carry are of me and were taken on the day of the accident.

As it is a Thomas the Tank Engine video the air ambulance just had to be Harold the Helicopter. He is a Megablocks model and he is of a much smaller scale but that doesn’t matter as he never appears alongside Thomas. Harold’s blades were made to rotate by drilling a hole through the body and attaching them to a Meccano axle rod which was powered by a No. 1 Meccano clockwork motor. Harold was filmed against some green card and the flying backgrounds are drone footage and a cloud background from the video editing software.

Thomas’s facial animation (and that of the Troublesome Truck) were added using CrazyTalk 8. A still frame was lifted from the video footage and imported into CrazyTalk. The resulting animation had a chroma-green background added before adding it back as a layer in the video editing software.

I appear as the recuperating caver and I was also added using the green screen technique.

The video was edited in Final Cut Pro on an Apple Mac computer. The narration was recorded on an iPhone using a Zoom iQ5 microphone. The fire engine bell was from the Final Cut Pro sound effects library and the helicopter sound from the iLife audio library. The background music from the YouTube audio library.