Thomas & Friends: Thomas & The Best-Kept Station Competition - How It Was Made

The below has been passed to us from the team, to share with the fandom.

We are overwhelmed by the response to the special.

We appreciate all the comments and feedback that have been shared and as a result we will be making some adjustments.

We also fully understand that without context misinterpretation can occur and this can and has been passed on and regarded as fact.

Therefore we have put together more detailed information about the project which will hopefully answer some of the questions that have been raised. 

After the enormous success of the reconstruction of the Down The Mine Pilot episode, a suggestion was then put forward of repurposing the original model footage to create a new live action episode, this being taken from the audio cassette comprising of 9 songs with narration produced in 1993.

Whilst 7 of the songs were given music videos and generally released as part of Series 4, the story itself was never used.

It was quickly realised that the story narration as it stood wouldn’t fully work as a stand alone episode and that the songs would be needed to transition from one story scene to the next.

So a very rough idea, effectively cutting and pasting any footage that vaguely matched the audio along with the existing song videos was put together as a guide.

2 of the songs never had model footage music videos released.

Whilst there are rumours that these were originally created, nothing has been found as yet within the footage archives, so we knew these would have to be created from scratch.

Unlike the episodes, the music videos have never been restored and so there is a big difference in visual quality.

It was at that point we realised that in order to make this project work all the existing songs would therefore need to be remade.

This however created a further problem.

The music videos make use of deleted scenes, alternative takes and specially shot material alongside finished episode footage.

The costs to even attempt to obtain all the original material and to then digitise / clean up was simply out of the question.

We had to make a decision, abandon the idea or make use of what was readily available which is the finished episodes.

This is what we decided to do.

As this project was being done purely as a nice to do / something extra for the fans, it was all done for free and in spare time.

It was then decided that the special would be used as part of the Discover Thomas & Friends Exhibition within Thomas Land at Drayton Manor Resort and exclusively for a limited time.

Now knowing what we had to work with, we decided to primarily use footage from Series 1 - 3 as that is what would have been around in 1993 and so with that we started to put together the story footage first.

This proved interesting as even though the episodes are restored each series has its unique charm, style and colour and so depending on the shots needed / used some mixing of series footage within a sequence looked a bit odd, and we felt that if we started altering the colour to match shots within a sequence it would take away the original charm.

With the songs we originally recreated them as close as we could and then filed in the gaps with appropriate footage.

The original music videos were as you would expect made as stand alone content and as such some same shot footage would be used across multiple songs.

We wanted to try and make the songs blend in with the story as much as possible and so in most cases footage is only seen once during a song and once during the story. Where footage is used more then once we have where possible altered the camera angle so it looks slightly different.

We have kept the spirit of the original music videos, for instance Thomas Anthem mostly uses footage from Series 3, the chorus in Really Useful Engine uses the same footage each time and Don’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover has the trucks taking centre stage for part of last chorus as per the originals.

There are some instances where footage has been moved to a different point of a music video because it felt right and a natural place to use it.

There was over 25 drafts taking into account various opinions and suggestions, and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

The audio was cleaned up and additional sound effects added which are all from the series.

We also added the musical intro for Let’s Have A Race and Don’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover as they were not present on the original audio.

We also added the extra elements of the Theme tune that were not on the original audio.

Where possible we have removed and or replaced Thomas’ audio whistle for his familiar one.

For the ending we looked at all footage with the key engines at Knapford, which was very limited and so decided to end on the Map Of Sodor taking inspiration from a similar idea in the music video It’s Great To Be An Engine.

And finally we thought it would be nice to end on a montage of the major characters.

As a clean restored version of the windmill sequence was not available we have used the Series 1 intro and traced the text to replicate it which is what is used throughout the intro and credits.

As the title is quite long the text is slightly smaller then in Series 1 and was positioned so it sat above the schoolboys head.

With regards to being released on YouTube, at present the special is being shown at Drayton Manor for a period of time. Nothing has been agreed for what happens after that time. 

The special is not designed in any way to replace the original music videos or the original audio production, it is its own separate entity and should be enjoyed as such.

The project is standalone and not part of SIF or any other group. SIF is being used purely as the platform to share the information to fans and they will forward anything back to us.

We hope that answers most questions and that you enjoy watching the special when you next visit Thomas Land.