MAXIMUM EXTERMINATION

So this was Friday night. After being alerted by Scott to filming down on Riverside, we picked him up then headed down for a few hours.

We saw them lay the track and put a man inside this dalek and record a scene from a few angles. This Dalek seems to be talking to a crowd of people. It said Men, women and descendants will be taken by the Daleks. A man is then heard (not the actor, just the AD filling in the lines) to send his family indoors and tells the Daleks to go back into the sky where they came from.

The Dalek cried 'Maximum extermination' and then fired. All this time, Wilf and Sylvia look on from an alleyway. Wilf has a paintball gun and says he plans to shoot the eye stalk, impairing the Dalek's vision. After the maximum extermination, Syvlia leads him away. They also shot scenes with a Dalek catching Wilf in an alleyway and is about to exterminate him when Rose arrives with a fuck off big gun and blows the Dalek up. We also saw a crowd of extra reacting to the maximum extermination. I'm not sure if they get wiped out or if the Dalek shoots the house the aforementioned family go and hide in - as the crowd were rained with debris ...... but somebody bites it, that is for sure

Now, from the position we were in, as the Dalek was performing its speech to the crowd, it was rolling right at us - looking at us. Apparently even Daleks use camera left and right techniques. Such professionals. The first rehearsal was actually spine chilling. It's no secret that I have never found Daleks to be particularly threatening. Cybermen always scared me much more as a child... but being there, with a real Dalek about 20 feet away, rolling towards me, with its proper voice calling out for my surrender, and then pointing its gun at us and crying out maximum extermination ... I don't mind admitting it was a frightening moment. Even though I could see Nick Briggs off to one side in the van doing the voice, even though there were a good 30 crew members and security milling about, even though I was stood with about 20 people behind a barrier, and even though I could see the trainers of the Dalek operator carefully wending his way along the tracking the case was resting on, so as not to trip over the rungs ..... all the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I had to cover my mouth to prevent myself crying out and ruining the shot.

That's the power of Doctor Who.