Into the Whoniverse

VFX creatives Will Cohen and Seb Barker share the secrets behind realising dramatic stunts and otherworldly creatures in the recent Doctor Who specials that heralded the arrival of Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor.

When Doctor Who returned for three special episodes to commemorate its 60th anniversary last year, it marked a new era for the long-running sci-fi series in more ways than one.

The trio – titled The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle – saw David Tennant return as the 14th Doctor alongside companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), before handing over the sonic screwdriver to Ncuti Gatwa, who became the 15th Doctor in The Giggle.

Gatwa then had his first solo outing in the 2023 Christmas special, called The Church on Ruby Road, which also introduced Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who would go on to travel in the TARDIS with the Doctor during season 14, which aired earlier this year.

Behind the scenes, the three episodes also marked the start of Russell T Davies’s second run as series showrunner, as well as the start of a new broadcasting pact between the BBC in the UK and Disney+, which picked up the rights to air Doctor Who around the world.

With Bad Wolf and BBC Studios Production making the show, the new deal brought with it expectations of bigger stories and more dazzling effects – and it was up to Will Cohen and Seb Barker, among a huge team of VFX experts, to help realise the visual ambitions.

At London’s VFX Festival earlier this year, the pair spoke about their work on the 60th anniversary specials and The Church at Ruby Road, creating dancing goblins and the unique bi-generation sequence that led to the introduction of Gatwa’s Doctor at the climax of The Giggle.

Cohen was part of the team that helped Davies revive Doctor Who in 2005, and he returned as VFX producer on the three 60th anniversary episodes, the Christmas 2023 special and the eight-part S14 that heralded a new era of Doctor Who.
Cohen: Our main brief with these specials and the series was to elevate the production value to a cinematic level, to make it as polished as we could for a new era.
When I started on it, the industry looked very different. We were shooting two years ago, but when we were prepping, it was the busiest era I’ve ever seen in the visual effects industry. You were struggling to get people for roles; people were spending money in what we might come to call the content wars.
So we made a plan to build a family of visual effects companies that would get right behind us and have that hunger and passion that you really need to create highly polished work. Seb was one of our collaborative visual effects partners on two of the specials and four of the eight episodes. Seb’s company [Automatik] was our main vendor.

The Giggle – in which the Doctor confronts the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris) after he sends the human race mad with violence – stands out as an example of what the whole Doctor Who team were trying to achieve in terms of its visual ambition.
Cohen: If you’re going to elevate production value for a show, it means you really need to make decisions in advance. Chanya Button, the director, sat with Dan May from Painting Practice. They had some concepts and they pre-visualised with Russell and the other execs all the key sequences in The Giggle to make them as cinematic and designed as possible. So we all knew what we were aiming to shoot and to finish.

Barker: The pre-vis in this show had quite a big role to play, partly so everyone understood the creative on the show, but also particularly on Doctor Who, the scripts were very ambitious. The amount of content Russell writes into his scripts is incredible, so pre-vis was a way of us really understanding all the shots before we shot them and pricing them out so we understood how much it was going to cost, and also getting Russell to sign off on them.

In The Giggle, there were several key moments that needed specific attention from the VFX team. One was the TARDIS on its flight path to UNIT Tower, a skyscraper in central London.
Cohen: One of the other big moments was the Doctor and Donna in a folding toy shop with the Toymaker. That was a big moment that we heavily pre-vis’d in order to work out how to get it right and affordable. And then, of course, there was the iconic bi-generation scene, which introduces the 15th Doctor. Those are three big moments. There was also stuff going on with puppets that needed heavily pre-vising, where the Doctor is turned into a marionette by the Toymaker and Charles Banerjee is turned into a marionette.

When it came to the bi-generation, which sees the Doctor ripped in half as he splits into both Tennant and Gatwa, it almost didn’t make the final cut.
Cohen: The bi-generation was very descriptive, but also very open. Because we pre-vis everything quite heavily, what we ended up doing on the bi-regeneration was pre-vising the camera moves and working out how to shoot it, but we left the visual effects design element very open for Seb and his team to create later on.
For me, that’s one of the most iconic moments in the specials. There’s a camera move on a repeatable crane that Dan designed to have this retreating camera upside down and revolve to see the Doctors separating in this big moment. It was a really ambitious shot for Doctor Who to achieve that involves lots of specialist equipment. Right up until the day before, we were considering whether to go ahead and do it or not. But it nearly didn’t make it.

Barker: If it was an unlimited budget, we would have done a very high-detail CG [computer generated] asset for both Doctors. We would have probably kept their heads, but reanimated their bodies so that we could, with an effects solution, actually join them together and have a transition that was seamless. So we pre-vis’d that heavily to stand the best chance of actually getting that to work in camera. And it’s not perfect, actually. It was just good enough for it to work and really land for that moment.

The demands of Doctor Who meant the VFX team were always pushed to make bold choices, like with the UNIT Tower sequence.
Barker: We pre-vis’d that heavily and, after a bit of back and forth, we decided it would be cheaper to rent a helicopter and go off and shoot all those plates [background scenes] than it would be to try to use stock [footage] or recreate them. We got some amazing footage, and it really made that sequence what it is.
Moving on to the sequence with the puppet, we have Charles Banerjee’s head on a puppet’s body. We had to find a practical solution. If it was a different production, probably we would have ended up with a completely CG version of Charles’ head, so that we could really make the join seamless and work well. But Russell really wanted that practical aesthetic of shows of old, and then using VFX to heighten that.

Practical effects also met VFX in The Church on Ruby Road, in which Gatwa’s Doctor meets orphan Ruby Sunday (Gibson) and they begin to experience bad luck wherever they go thanks to the arrival of some goblins.
Barker: Russell was very adamant from the outset that the creatures should be practical. He really wanted the episode to have a Labyrinth vibe. So Labyrinth, Gremlins, Gremlins 2 – that was the inspiration, but obviously using visual effects [as well] to add a nuance of motion and being able to animate the eyes and the ears and give them a feeling that they’re alive, which is very hard to get over when you’re doing them purely animatronically.
With the goblins, we actually ended up deciding to shoot them with full-sized actors who we shrunk down to make look small in the episode. Neill Gorton at Millennium FX created rigid masks for their faces, with no facial movement at all, with the understanding that VFX would then come in and replace most of the head in CG, but keep the tone of what was shot for real. We could then go in and animate their ears, which gave a huge range of emotion. Some of them didn’t have removable ears, so there were lots of very complex shots of painting massive floppy ears out from in front of actors’ faces.

Cohen: By this point in our production, we’ve done the three specials. We shot the first two episodes of the series, and we came back to make the fourth special in February 2023. It was our shortest production time from finishing it to delivering for Christmas. But what we learned by then is a lot about what people liked aesthetically. We’ve had a lot of discussions – rubber, digital, what should it be? – and what ways we could work together to enhance the show.
By this point, we walked into doing Christmas with our eyes open that it would be a prosthetic, it would be enhanced digitally by Seb and his team, and they did a lot of tests on what that could look like and what we’d be able to do in advance. So we had a lot of time to plan it. We had very early discussions when we first saw the script, and we immediately ruled out doing full CG goblins because we had quite a lot else to do.

Barker: There’s always this discussion on keeping that tangibility and that feel and that vibe of Henson productions, but also making it feel modern and making it stand up to other shows that it sits against on the BBC and Disney+.

The Goblin King then presented a much bigger challenge…
Cohen: We shot the Goblin King for real. Then there was some debate, particularly in the close-up shots [about VFX]. It’s a great bit of work for Millennium, but because the goblins were working out so well in terms of the expressions Seb and his team were able to get into it, it was a late decision to take what Seb had done, which feels a bit more organic in the faces of the goblins, and lose some of the animatronic feeling to the Goblin King, because it felt a tiny bit robotic in places when the camera was lingering on it. Seb then did a job doing what he did on the goblins on the Goblin King.

Barker: Every shot we did work on had an animatronic version of it. Some shots you’ll see in the sequence were 90% animatronic with a very small amount of CG, some shots were entirely animatronic, and then other shots were larger CGI replacements. We sometimes kept areas of the animatronic and we made special care to base all assets entirely on the scan of the real thing. If you go between ours and the original, it’s a complete match because it has to cut with shots that are entirely animatronic. But going CG on some shots just gave us a nuance of animation that would have been really hard to achieve.

Do VFX artists prefer to have an animatronic to base their work on?
Barker: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If the animatronic is there, it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to follow the animation of that animatronic perfectly. In the example of the Goblin King, if it’s just sitting there doing nothing, not moving around, and the camera is on the Goblin King, we can reanimate the face in the way we want to.
Where I would say no is if you’ve got a creature running around – for example, if the camera is following that animatronic creature or the man in a suit, whatever it is – then you are a little bit more locked into the performance of what that creature is doing. Budget often dictates it because to build an animatronic and to replace it in CG is more expensive than building a much-simplified version of a puppet and then putting CG over the top of it.
In a perfect world, if money was no question, you’d have some sort of an animatronic prosthetic stand in for shots that it made sense for, and then for shots where there were bigger, performance-led animation beats that you had to design, you would probably take that out and find some other way of giving your camera team something to line up to.

Cohen: Even if it’s a stick with a ping pong ball on the top, you do really need to get something in there anyway for eyelines if you’re doing creatures. The lighting reference you get off of a stand-in prosthetic, even if you’re going to replace it, is invaluable. And the actors have something to act off, which is also invaluable.

tagged in: Bad Wolf, BBC, BBC Studios Production, Disney, Doctor Who, Seb Barker, Will Cohen