Studio delivers concept design, hybrid virtual production previs, postvis, motion graphics, and VFX design and supervision across all three anniversary episodes - ‘The Star Beast,’ ‘Wild Blue Yonder,’ and ‘The Giggle;’ work includes creating the Doctor’s all-new Tardis interior virtual reality asset and graphic language for his new Sonic Screen.
U.K.-based design studio Painting Practice has shared a design reel showcasing their visual development work on all three BBC and Bad Wolf’s 60th Anniversary Special episodes of Doctor Who: “The Star Beast,” “Wild Blue Yonder,” and “The Giggle.”
The studio’s team worked closely with the show’s producer, Bad Wolf’s production designer Phil Sims, and VFX producer Will Cohen from the early development phase, throughout the shoot and later with the VFX teams of Automatik, Untold, and RealTime VFX. Painting Practice was tapped for its digital art capabilities, streamlining creative and technical design process across all three episodes, and delivering concept design, hybrid virtual production previs, postvis, motion graphics, and VFX design and supervision.
Painting Practice co-founder Dan May helmed the project, serving as overall VFX supervisor for the three episodes with creative director and graphics art director Erica McEwan. The studio delivered various visual development and visualization work spanning all key environments, features, and creatures. The work included the screen adaptation of the Dave Gibbons and Pat Mills comic-book iteration of the Meep and Wrath soldiers, VFX asset creation, set extensions, and previsualization for the Meep Spaceship and Escape Pod. Additionally, previs was delivered for the fiery “London Cracking” phenomenon and the Doctor’s regeneration sequence through shot design and the plan to establish the Unit Tower. The team achieved the “infinite” Ghost Ship corridor using hybrid virtual production, previsualization, and VFX. It also developed a new Tardis interior as a virtual reality asset. It established the graphic language for the Doctor’s new Sonic Screen, figuring out how to make the giant Toymaker’s Theater fold into a tiny box.
Painting Practice’s hybrid virtual production techniques were key to some of the more complex VFX design challenges of the second episode, “Wild Blue Yonder,” in which The Doctor and Donna find themselves stranded aboard the Ghost Ship facing their uncanny doppelgangers. May worked with Sims and director Tom Kingsley to design and build the infinite Ghostship corridor scenes in Unreal, which became a digital asset for previs, subsequently passed to RealTime VFX to take to final pixel. May supervised the physical green screen shoot with David Tennant, Catherine Tate, and the robot. He used the digital corridor asset with Mo-Sys for on-set camera tracking, creating instant postvis and a guide for the actors. The challenge in planning and post was ensuring the corridors blended with the real sets. Painting Practice also created and delivered all the eerie exterior Ghost Ship and Drone VFX shots.
“Working with Dan May and the team at Painting Practice was a really creative and collaborative experience - the most fun bit of the whole production,” said Kingsley. “It was hugely creatively freeing working on pre-vis so quickly and nimbly. It meant we could dream big, sketch out lots of avenues to pursue, and find out if something wasn’t working well in advance of getting to the set.”
He continued, “We could keep testing out different versions of big action sequences during the writing process - so we could rewrite the script to match the animatic and keep going back and forth with input from all departments as to what would be most achievable and look the best. I could do a scrappy sketch of an idea, and later that day, the brilliant concept artists would have transformed it into something far better to properly help sell the idea to the execs and showrunner. In fact, the concept art was to such a high standard that the challenge was really to try and make the episode look as good as the concept art."
A big challenge for “The Giggle” (Episode 3) was achieving the cinematic scale required to introduce the new UNIT Tower in London and its high-tech environment, the arrival of the Doctor at the Tower, and the camera move for the iconic regeneration of the Doctor into his 15th incarnation. To achieve this, May and the Painting Practice team worked closely with director Chanya Button and director of photography Mika Orasmaa, planning and designing each shot using various techniques, including puppet rehearsals; 3d storyboarding in Unreal with a virtual camera and set planning; Unreal techvis using scale models of London to plan the helicopter shoots; and Unreal rendered previs techniques closely matching the final edit. May then worked with Automatik to carry the thinking into the final phase of VFX.
“Our brief from Bad Wolf was to bring some of the high-quality production value and design we achieved on His Dark Materials to the Doctor Who franchise, whilst respecting the original tone and iconic heritage of the show,” said May. “One way we achieved this was by approaching the shot design for each episode on the scale of a mini-feature film and delivering detailed planning to fit this scale into the time and the budget. Our tried and tested mix of creative and technical problem solving can truly be seen in the final episodes.”
“As a digital art department with multiple capabilities, from concept and previz to final pixel, Painting Practice adds enormous value to projects with their passion for cinematic storytelling,” added Cohen. “Their design aesthetic and the depth of their creative thinking put them in a very unique bracket. Their joined up approach was a huge contributing factor to elevating the quality of the VFX work in Doctor Who.”
Painting Practice delivered additional elements of Doctor Who 60th Anniversary campaign, including logo design, visual design, and the previs of the new Doctor Who titles. The studio was also commissioned to create the VFX for the decolorization work on the iconic six-episode series The Daleks, broadcast one week before the first special episode.
Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Design Overview:
Painting Practice began development work on the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary special episodes in late 2021, with the shoot and asset build in 2022 and delivery in 2023. Filming took place at Wolf Studios, Cardiff, London, and Bristol.
Episode 1 of Doctor Who’s 60th Anniversary Special premiered on November 25, with additional episodes debuting December 2 and December 9. Watch on BBC iPlayer and Disney+ globally outside the U.K. and Ireland.
Source: Painting Practice
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
