The Day of the Doctor.

 "We are here!  We are here!"

Doctor Seuss, Horton Hears A Who.

All the Whos down in Whoville, the tall and the small...

Hello to the fellow Whovians in the audience - twenty minutes to the fiftieth anniversary broadcast of Doctor Who:  are we all ready? Have you gone to the toilet?  Have you put on your fez, scarf, or sprig of celery, depending on your favourite Doctor?  Do you have your sonic screwdriver in hand?

One of the key reasons for the longevity (no pun intended) of Doctor Who is the flexibility of the concept.  Each of the actors who has portrayed the renegade Time Lord has brought something different to the role:  the Doctor has been a father figure, a comedian, a sage, a scientist - and today, if the intriguing online prequel episode is a reliable guide, we meet the Warrior.

The Doctor has always had a sort of fragile, contradictory covenant with the concept of non-violent solutions - he won't even accept the phrase "we'll kill them" as a metaphor for success at football - but he is also responsible for ending the Time War, apparently by wiping out both sides of the conflict, the Daleks and his own people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey.  I'm hoping that today's episode will shed some light on how all of that came about, how the Doctor was able to reconcile all the elements of his character in order to commit genocide - twice.

Ooops, nine minutes to go, off to the telly - more to follow.

- Sid

"Clear skies with a chance of satellite debris."

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón's homage to mass and inertia, is a great movie.  Sandra Bullock gives a gripping performance as orbital disaster victim Dr. Ryan Stone, supported by scripting and direction that combine to present an intimate, emotional experience against an epic backdrop. The film beautifully balances and contrasts the awesome beauty of planet Earth as seen from orbit with touches of humanity: country and western music, bits of everyday life like chess pieces and pens, and the crying of a baby over a radio.

But the really impressive thing about Gravity, the thing that really caught my attention?

It's not science fiction.

The settings of space shuttle, International Space Station and Soyuz flight module are real settings; the spacesuits are real spacesuits, with clumsy gloves and fogged faceplates; and the dangers being faced are real dangers, no more fictional than the perils of being killed during a bank robbery or waking up in a burning house.   

Yes, we as a species have now reached a point in time where it's possible to make a 90 minute movie, set in space*, in which the heroine narrowly escapes death by satellite debris impact, lack of oxygen, zero-gee combustion, freezing, explosive decompression, and burning up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere, and it's not science fiction. In fact, when it finally dawned on me that I wasn't watching a science fiction movie, I was almost embarrassed, as if I had gone to the theatre under false pretenses. 

 And the next step?  The next step is we start shooting on location...

- Sid

* Okay, near-Earth orbit if you're going to be picky.

Location location location.

And now, a call to action.  I'm in the very early stages of negotiating a joint steampunk costume-and-photoshoot project with a friend of mine - and I mean VERY early, to the point where I'm thinking in terms of the spring or summer of 2014 for actually taking the pictures.  However, if this goes ahead, I see it as being a lot of fun. I imagine the results as being very earth-toned, relying on stripes and ruffles, stockings and short jackets, decorative brass accents, hats with veils, and perhaps a bit of copper pipe here and there– for the steam, you know…

I'm a big fan of environmental photography for things like this - I think it would be a huge tragedy to invest a great deal of time and effort in evoking the alternate history of the British Empire in the form of a costume, only to document it in front of an eight foot roll of white seamless paper in a studio. So, I open this up to those blog readers who live in the Greater Vancouver region: where should we go to photograph the eventual results, if any?*

I realize that the nature of the costume will play a part in the choice of a location.  An intrepid aviatrix would call for a completely different situation than a daring explorer, scientific detective, or corset-clad assassin.  But let's not limit things at this stage, let's start by casting as wide a net as possible - where are the best rivets, girders, gears, locomotives, and arcane engines in the Lower Mainland?

Oh, and just for the record, I don't think that we're going to take the route of creating a steampunk courtesan's costume.  Very little challenge to that, in my mind that just means adding goggles and subtracting clothing, which would make for a completely different photoshoot.  Certainly interesting in its own way, but not what we're after.

- Sid

* See above re: VERY early stages.  Life is full of change, and the whole thing may fall through.  Don't worry, if something does come of this, I do plan to post the results here, with the permission of my collaborator.