Saving Doctor Who: Visual Effects

Special effects are like magic. They only work if you can't see how they're done.

20th Century Doctor Who was notoriously cheaply produced, but many of the effects stand up surprisingly well. Let's compare two such effects with their modern equivalent.

The original regeneration effect in The Tenth Planet was done by cross-fading from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton with a broken fader. This caused the first Doctor's face to flare out and then fade back into the second's. It still looks good now, and must have been even more impressive at the time, when the audience had never seen a regeneration before and didn't know what do expect. It was meant to imply that something mysterious and eerie was happening to the Doctor. The fountain of golden light effect used in 21st Century Doctor Who looks flashy, and seems to be intended to give an impression of enormous power.

The Dalek extermination effect used up to Genesis of the Daleks involved overexposing the image of the victim until it solarised. That was meant to give an impression of overwhelming power, and it works. It still looks genuinely scary now. By contrast, the effect used in 21st Century stories, where the victim turns into a glowing skeleton, looks incredibly fake.

One key reason that neither of the 21st Century effects look as good as their 20th Century predecessors is that they're both obviously CGI. CGI has been overused, not just in Doctor Who but in other shows, to the extent that everybody can spot it a mile off. By contrast, in the 20th Century, production teams just had to get creative with what they had available.

This doesn't mean that the effects used in the 20th Century were always better. The Invisible Enemy looks pretty ropy, especially the giant prawn costume, and the stop motion dinosaurs in Invasion of the Dinosaurs were contracted out to a company that over-promissed and under-delivered. It seems that in the wilderness years, the things things didn't work were remembered more than the things that did, and Doctor Who's reputation for being cheap and shonky became somewhat exagerated. So when the show came back, the producers wanted to say "We've got a budget now, and we're not afraid to use it!", and make sure we saw the money on screen. As well as the overuse of flashy and obvious CGI effects, this led to things like the fashion parade of irrelevant aliens in The End of the World. The trend was only exacerbated by the money from the Disney deal, and fueled RTD's unfortunate tendency towards style over substance.

This doesn't mean that CGI doesn't have its place - for example, it could be used to create aliens like we've never seen before - but it has to be used subtly, and the visual effects team should think carefully about what will work best and look most natural in a particular scene.

Getting creative with what you've got still works. The production team needed to save money on Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead because other stories had run over budget. So the "I'm sorry, you have two shadows" effect was done simply with lighting.

My advice to the next production team is that the effects have to serve the story, and that it's not the money we want to see on screen, it's the creativity.

And maybe you should have a conjuror on your effects team.