The Production Guide
Script To Screen: Black Sun
by Martin Willey

Script To Screen

• Script
• Script incommunicado
• Script gossip
• Script Bergman prays
• Call sheet Ageing
• Call sheet Corridor Electrocution

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As the Black Sun drains Alpha's power, the base gets colder. To indicate how the Alphans are dressed against the cold, the wardrobe had a 7-stage system, which here moves from 4 to 7.

Today, the crew complete scene 118, when Koenig and Bergman walk into Main Mission and tell Paul Morrow he is relieved. Bergman then gets out his 60-year old brandy (Courvoisier Napoleon Fine) and they drink "To everything that might have been." The next main scene is scene 127, which is broken into two sections because in the second part of the scene, Landau and Morse have old-age make-up.

There are a number of special camera shots in this scene, moving back from the characters, or zooming into Koenig's aged face. The camera was mounted on a wheeled carriage called a Velocilator (a lighter weight version of a Rotambulator, and generally what is called a dolly), which was mounted on tracks. The "locked off" camera was a fixed camera, here used to make Landau and Morse transparent (the film was exposed twice, first with actors on set, then on the empty set, so Main Mission can be seen through them). An anamorphic lens is a spherical lens which can be used in cinema films to produce a wide-screen format, but here is used to distort the image. Diopters are also curved lenses, particularly used for close-ups, such as the shots showing the make-up. The star filter is a special lens with lines that makes light sources flare (the six-pointed star lights around Landau and Morse are created with star filters).

While they wait for the make-up, there are two cover sets, firstly the card game with Smitty, and secondly Paul with Tanya ("Mind if I share the music with you?"). Also here are the computer captions on Koenig's desk screen when he asks the names for "Operation Survival Ship". We never see these in the completed episode ("For Alcom eyes only, named selected to maximise stated criteria").

Landau and Morse would continue in make-up the following day (scene 129, "Every star is just a cell in the brain of the universe."). In the script they are described as "Still as ancient men, but now they are wearing long shiny white robes. They walk among the stars." In today's call sheet we see the wardrobe states "white robes or spacesuits to be decided"; evidently the decision was to keep Koenig and Bergman in spacesuits.

Publicity photos of the make-up. Note the BBC "Screen Test" camera (a 16mm Eclair NPR) in the background of one shot.