By Stephen Kelly, Wired UK
The Daleks returning to Doctor Who is hardly bow-tie spinning stuff. But every Dalek ever? Every single type from the show’s 49-year history reunited in one room? Well, that’s more trouble than you can shake a plunger at.
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“It’s only when I read Steven Moffat’s script in its entirety that I thought: ‘Oh God, what are we going to do now?'” said series producer Marcus Wilson, who was tasked with the logistical nightmare of assembling Asylum Of The Dalek‘s pepper-pot party — most of which they didn’t even own.
“We needed help,” he said. “We called them back from the BBC, borrowed older ones from exhibitions, renovated a few that have been battle damaged over the years. A lot of the show came to be, however, from fans who lent us Daleks that they had built themselves — most of which were so detailed we could shoot on them in HD close to camera. Even [former show-runner] Russell T. Davies has a Dalek in his hallway, so we went up to Manchester to pick it up from him. We must have had over 30 different Daleks on set and we only had around five of our own.”
The two main sequences that required numbers was the Asylum (spoilers!) and the more grandiose Parliament scene, which features a CGI wide-shot with 20,000 Daleks — powered by Solid Angle’s rendering software, Arnold, a batch renderer that allows you to animate “render multiples and multiples of Daleks that maybe even a year ago we wouldn’t have been able to achieve on a television schedule.”
To replicate with CGI, however, there had to be physical Daleks present. “Having the Daleks on set is quite an odd process because you rehearse the scenes with the operators standing in for the them but then when it comes to shooting, the poor guys are in there for about four or five hours at a time,” Wilson said. “You can just see the glow of iPhones through the head grills as they play games or read e-books. You also never know if there’s someone inside or not. So you’ll think you’re having a conversation with someone and suddenly another Dalek will respond. They do keep you on your toes.”
One of those “poor guys” inside the Daleks is Barnaby Edwards, who, alongside Nicholas Pegg, has been principle operator since the series returned in 2005. And despite describing it as being like “sitting on an office chair and sticking a dustbin on your head,” he assures us it’s much harder than it seems.
“Without sounding too pretentious,” Wilson said. “It’s just like any other performance. It’s a role that you have to play and make work. That’s why they still have people inside them and they’re not automated, because it isn’t easy to make this hunk of fibre glass, metal and wood appear to be a living, breathing creature.”
Indeed, given that the Daleks are pulled along with your feet (much like a Flintstones car), there’s a certain amount of technique that needs to be perfected. “You can always tell when someone hasn’t operated a Dalek before. It is quite difficult,” Wilson said. “You’re reliant on three wheels, which isn’t the most stable construction to keep something from rocking side to side, so you have to keep your weight central inside it. Pretty much all of the Dalek operators come from a sort of dance background. It does require incredibly strong legs — we’ve all got fantastic calf muscles.”
It’s a trait that they share with operators of classic-era Daleks, who were recruited from ballet backgrounds. Yet Edwards, who operated ten different Daleks in the new episode, reckoned that they had it easy.
“We have, over the years, studied our ancestors and looked at old episodes of Doctor Who to work out the little tricks the Daleks have,” Wilson said. “That’s especially true with this episode because we knew we were going to be recreating old Daleks. The basic principles are the same, but in terms of operation, the old-style Daleks…I don’t want to do the old guys down but they had it slightly easier. They are much easier to operate because they’re lighter.
“In the old days you had to put up a Who set on one day and then have to take it down and put it up again the following week, so everything was made far lighter so it was easier to put up and take down again. That went for the Daleks as well,” he added. “Nowadays, though, they need to build a Dalek that will last, that can tour the country, appear in museums and then, in episodes, handle being fired at, kicked and generally blown up. They have to be more durable now so they have to be made out of heavier materials.”
And here we were thinking that Daleks were tough.
Image courtesy BBC
