How did Cura time his telesnaps

[ianphillips]

So did John Cura shoot his telesnaps based on a time interval or just whenever he thought the screen looked cool, because I notice that there are no images in the middle of cross-fades, which you think would have happened at some point.

[Paul Vanezis]

Jan 30, 2017 1:32:45 GMT ianphillips said:

So did John Cura shoot his telesnaps based on a time interval or just whenever he thought the screen looked cool, because I notice that there are no images in the middle of cross-fades, which you think would have happened at some point.

We don't have the negatives, so we don't know for sure, but like any photographer he would have edited his stills. He got through so much film, that he would have processed everything on site and had his own darkroom and printer to enable him to do this.

He certainly took a great interest in the quality of what he was producing. On the paper sleeves for 'The Other Man', one of the episodes was photographed from the repeat, which was a film recording replay. The quality is obviously not as good as the other episodes and he wrote a short note on the envelope to Alan Bromly to explain.

Paul

[Richard Bignell]

Jan 30, 2017 1:32:45 GMT ianphillips said:

So did John Cura shoot his telesnaps based on a time interval or just whenever he thought the screen looked cool, because I notice that there are no images in the middle of cross-fades, which you think would have happened at some point.

Well, they didn't really tend to use that many cross-fades in 1960s episodes. That said, there were odd occasions when Cura took stills that just happened to occur when a shot change happened and you got two pictures interleaved and there were quite a number when a photograph missed the action completely and all you got was an empty picture or someone's back or got nothing but a blurry mess when something fast moving was happening. When DWM published the telesnaps in the past, they tended to leave out the ones that didn't really show anything, as often the space they had available wasn't as great as the number of telesnaps taken from an episode.

Cura could have used interval timers on his camera to take pictures automatically, but there's no timed regularity in his Doctor Who telesnaps, so he must have been doing them by hand and making judgements on what to take based on what he was actually watching at the time.

[Owen Conway]

Jan 30, 2017 10:11:04 GMT Paul Vanezis said:

Jan 30, 2017 1:32:45 GMT ianphillips said:

So did John Cura shoot his telesnaps based on a time interval or just whenever he thought the screen looked cool, because I notice that there are no images in the middle of cross-fades, which you think would have happened at some point.

We don't have the negatives, so we don't know for sure, but like any photographer he would have edited his stills. He got through so much film, that he would have processed everything on site and had his own darkroom and printer to enable him to do this.

He certainly took a great interest in the quality of what he was producing. On the paper sleeves for 'The Other Man', one of the episodes was photographed from the repeat, which was a film recording replay. The quality is obviously not as good as the other episodes and he wrote a short note on the envelope to Alan Bromly to explain.

Paul

The BBC site containing the telesnaps is old and broken now. Do you think the BBC will ever post the archive of telesnaps on one of their new Doctor Who websites, along with the telesnaps not previously featured?

[Richard Bignell]

I would doubt it, Owen. Funding on BBC websites seems to be getting more and more restricted and of course, Doctor Who Magazine has republished all the telesnaps in recent years in three big specials.

The old BBC Doctor Who website pages with the telesnaps are still there though and still accessible. Just search for them in Google. For example, searching on BBC Faceless Ones telesnaps brings up this link.

www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/faceless/

[Deleted]

or just whenever he thought the screen looked cool

I love that! The idea that John Cura recognized cool in what he saw. Yeah, I supposed the coolest episodes of Doctor Who are the ones we haven't got. Troughton was cool, for sure.

[lousingh]

I have always wished that John Cura could have had multiple cameras and tonnes of film to use to take a picture every few seconds. With the technology we have today, we could *really* reconstruct the original stories. Ah, well...

[Michael D. Kimpton]

Feb 1, 2017 22:49:50 GMT lousingh said:

I have always wished that John Cura could have had multiple cameras and tonnes of film to use to take a picture every few seconds. With the technology we have today, we could *really* reconstruct the original stories. Ah, well...

I heard later on that he acquired a second television set so that he could snap programmes from BBCTV and ITV simultaneously. If that's true, his attention to get the best shots from two separate progeammes at once must have been incredible to behold.

[Steve Hamilton]

Do we know for sure that John Cura did not take telesnaps for the season 3 stories Galaxy 4 to The Celestial Toymaker?
Generally it is considered that 'he only took telesnaps of stories that he was requested (paid) to do so'.
missingepisodes.blogspot.co.uk/p/tele-snaps.html.

However, if for example producer John Wiles decided not to have this option, he was only at the helm for The Myth Makers to The Ark. Verity Lambert was in the chair for Galaxy 4 and MTTU, and Innes LLoyd for 'Toymaker'.
Did the 'missing scrapbook one' ever exist in the written archive?

Although Verity Lambert herself, it seems did not request snaps, rather another member of the production team e.g. the director it seems at odds that no one was interested in this service for those episodes which also form a strange little gap in production which doesn't really match with the Producer.
If, for example Douglas Camfield requested those snaps from The Crusade which were found elsewhere, could he also have requested The Dalek Masterplan for the record?
Even if they existed I suppose they are now sadly destroyed anyway (sighs heavily) but I am just musing here.

[Richard Bignell]

John Wiles actually started working on the programme from Galaxy 4 onwards. He was officially trailing Verity Lambert on both Galaxy 4 and Mission to the Unknown (which were effectively treated as being one production) although Lambert's name still appeared on the credits. In reality, it's highly probable that by this time she was already extensively working on setting-up the new series she was moving on to, The Newcomers, so it's likely that Wiles was effectively working as the producer on these two stories with Lambert more in the background providing any needed guidance. It's probably why the use of telesnaps suddenly curtails at this point. There's certainly no evidence in the contemporary paperwork that Cura was ever commissioned or paid for taking telesnaps of these five episodes or indeed any from the Wiles era. We do have the exterior documentary evidence for many of the other episodes though.

People involved with the various productions could certainly have commissioned Cura privately if the wanted to. However, many many years ago, I contacted as many surviving actors and all the surviving directors that I could find from those stories with missing non-telesnapped episodes and none of them had any telesnaps from their Doctor Who stories. Only a handful were even aware of Cura and only one ever used his services (Norman Mitchell, from The Daleks' Master Plan).

There was only ever one file of DW telesnaps in the BBC's Written Archive. There's no evidence of the existence of a second.

[Steve Hamilton]

Thanks Richard. Very knowledgeable as always!

[Stephen John Connett]

Would make a good drama/doc, one man's obsession type thing

[Ed Brown]

Feb 1, 2017 22:49:50 GMT lousingh said:

I have always wished that John Cura could have had multiple cameras and tonnes of film to use to take a picture every few seconds. With the technology we have today, we could *really* reconstruct the original stories.

Yes. All he needed to do was buy tons of Kodachrome film, and snap away at 25 frames a second.