Life force footage

[wombstar]

The life force clock quite often appears on screen, along a back wall or on the floor, but the advisors see it? or ahs it been edited in for the audience at home? Whenever it just pops up nobody in the team seems to acknowledge it.

[HobGoblin]

I believe this was added in post production so the teams didn't see it.

I was watching Barry's S7 winning quest the other day and there's a bit I remember well from the original tx where they have to get Barry under a drip of water before lifeforce runs out. I honestly thought they nearly died when I first watched this, but it's clear they only guide Barry over to the water because Treguard becomes increasingly frantic in his lifeforce warnings. They're really quite indifferent to the threat and have no idea the animation has no armor left.

Also - back to my mate Anthony from series 4 - he says one of the reasons they took so long to work out that they needed to cover up the lifeforce draining statue was that they didn't fully understand the draining effect due to the fact they couldn't see the animation. Pickle intervened and the rest is history...

[pjmlfc05]

I believe this was added in post production so the teams didn't see it.

I was watching Barry's S7 winning quest the other day and there's a bit I remember well from the original tx where they have to get Barry under a drip of water before lifeforce runs out. I honestly thought they nearly died when I first watched this, but it's clear they only guide Barry over to the water because Treguard becomes increasingly frantic in his lifeforce warnings. They're really quite indifferent to the threat and have no idea the animation has no armor left.

Also - back to my mate Anthony from series 4 - he says one of the reasons they took so long to work out that they needed to cover up the lifeforce draining statue was that they didn't fully understand the draining effect due to the fact they couldn't see the animation. Pickle intervened and the rest is history...

Poor Pickle!

[Mystara]

Yep, entirely post production.

[wombstar]

I guess it was, so did any of the teams ever see it on screen? ever during a death?

[Mystara]

Not if it was post production.

[HobGoblin]

I assume that teams weren't even aware of changes to the lifeforce animation until they saw it on TV?

[Canadanne]

This was mentioned in one of the letters provided by Ray Lockton, which seem to have gone missing from the website but I found it on an archived version:
"It cannot be displayed on the advisors' monitor but its correct status will be given to each team at the commencement of each chamber scene. During the scene any change of Life Force status will be clearly passed on as a warning by the Dungeon Master."

[HobGoblin]

Just to clarify my last post - I meant they wouldn't know that lifeforce was now an armored skeleton/ a pie. Unless they were simply told about it?

[Mystara]

For some reason, I have a memory of being told whether our life force was red, amber, or green by a production assistant just as we were prepping to resume filming in a room.

But realistically, it was meaningless. If you needed food, it was there and you took it.

[wombstar]

That's interesting.

It certainly added to the drama from the viewers point, and used as a way for the dungeon master to hurry the teams up by giving them a 'potential' threat.

I'm a bit surprised it wasn't shown to the team on a death, in particular the early ones where they got locked in a room or turning off the lamp and bascily died because it drained away.

I guess that's why by the end it was just a pie and served even less.

[Billy]

Even at the age of 12 I realised that the so called "life force warnings" were pretty meaningless. Perhaps if they'd have been a bit more careful with its usage, but when teams are constantly about 0.3 seconds away from it running out just as they're putting some food in their knapsack it starts to look a bit suspicious. Never was a team ever in danger of dying by their so-called life force running out.

And before anyone mentions a certain future team of Series 2 (not yet shown on the life force but easily look-upable on the site), I count that more as a forced lock-in rather than the life-force drain it claimed to be, including by someone who's put it on Wikipedia as apparently the only life force drain death of the entire series. I don't want to cause an argument so I've left it as is even though I don't agree with it.

[HobGoblin]

Most of you will have seen this but seems worth mentioning that there are a couple of relevant sections in the Tim Child interview at http://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?page_id=193:

"The principle of the first life force clock was again borrowed from Atic Atac. There was no programming involved – it was just a linear cgi animation sequence. The Travelling Matte Company built it to my brief. It looked great but the trouble is it was always too short and there were not enough frames in it to slow it down and make it longer. It also didn’t edit too well for Life refresh purposes."

"Life Force is really what we call a hurry-up, but starvation makes for a rather boring death, so if a team were really slow, we’d summon up a monster and kill them with that instead. After all: they deserved to die, and we gave them an interesting death instead."

[wombstar]

So why couldn't they throw it up on the teams screen? Showing the Skull and Green man face always hurried them along.

A team so fair has already died due to a ghost draining the life force.

[Mystara]

Because it's fake. It's not real and has no effect on gameplay. Given that one room might take one team 30 seconds to figure out and might take another team five minutes to complete, there wouldn't be any way to keep it consistent without killing every single team due to "life loss".

I understand it had originally been Tim Child's intention to have a proper life force clock that would act as a sort of measurement of "health" or "hit points" but it was too complicated, probably for the above reasons. Indeed, I do believe that there is one episode where a team is hit by the spectral scorpion and appears to take a hit to life force, but again, this was all post production.