Doctor Who producer Derek Ritchie explains the challenges and successes of shooting the new series.
The joy of working on Doctor Who is that every story brings unique creative challenges with it that you wouldn’t find anywhere else, and which that very talented behind-the-scenes team are always willing to meet! So it was with delight we plunged (pardon the pun) into the realising of an underwater world for the spooky two-parter Under the Lake / Before the Flood, written by Being Human scribe and Doctor Who stalwart Toby Whithouse. And where else would you want to film an underwater world? Well, in Cardiff Bay, obviously!
Okay, so we weren’t filming in the actual bay, but at Roath Lock Studios where we decided to build the base – The Drum – in all of its glory. We had several sets, the centrepiece of which was the huge Hangar which housed the sinister spaceship dredged up from the depths of the lake, and which at one end we placed the all-important Control Room. Putting these two sets together meant we made the most of our Hangar, as shooting towards the windows in the Control Room meant shooting the full depth of that impressive space. And in the middle of that set was the spaceship itself…
Early on director Daniel O’Hara, designer Michael Pickwoad and myself decided that building the spaceship in full was a sensible approach – it had a huge role to play in the story, had to be fully interactive, and be used both in studio and on location. In addition, having an actual object to light, to dress, and to augment with SFX such as steam and water, gave it a much more real texture than we might have achieved purely with CGI.
We used surprisingly few water elements on the base set. Ingenious effects from the seasoned Doctor Who lighting team proved incredibly effective, and DoP Richard Stoddard found inventive ways to include that sense of water moving and reflecting throughout all of the sets - such as using ‘skylights’ in the corridors to create shimmering pools of watery light. This naturalistic approach worked well in the context of what we were making – a classic ghost story given the unique Doctor Who twist!
Although most of the haunting took place on the base itself, the story ultimately moves back in time to before the base existed, when the submerged town was a much drier military training base in the north of Scotland in 1980. But where would we go to film a military training base in South Wales? Well how about the military training base at Caerwent?! Frequently used for filming, this proved to be an ideal location – easily adapted for our needs, with superb infrastructure. All we were missing was a dam and some mountains, which some post-production trickery from Milk (VFX) and Gareth Spensley (colourist at Molinaire) deftly added. And there we had it – a fake Russian town in the Scottish Highlands in 1980! With a spooky spaceship parked slap-bang in the middle!
Doctor Who is without a doubt, the most challenging and rewarding of productions. But what really makes bringing to life the endlessly disparate and surprising worlds of the series a real pleasure, is the hugely talented and ionate crew that work on the show, and who through Doctor Who have put Wales on the map as a place where the highest quality television and film can be very successfully produced.
Doctor Who, Saturday 17 October, BBC One
