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Sheffield; November 23, 2009. The 11th Doctor is standing in a grey room with his eyes shut, screaming loudly. Across from him, a tall man with a mop of curly hair and wraparound glasses is recording every detail of our hero's appearance, in 45° increments.
Is the Time Lord in trouble? No -- but he is about to materialise on an alien landscape: a transmedia video game.
Today, Matt Smith, the 27-year old from Northampton who plays the Doctor, is being rotoscoped by Sean Millard, creative director of developer Sumo Digital. It's an animation process which involves tracing the lines of photographs and video frames to recreate a person in 3D, and Smith has spent the morning performing the library of expressions and actions that his avatar will later use in The Adventure Games.
The computer render of Smith is apparently so accurate that the actor found it disconcerting to see himself -- physical quirks and all -- transferred to the game. "I was quite concerned at the way I ran," says Smith. "Apparently like Tony Adams, with a straight back."
Having launched on June 5, the day of the TV series' tenth episode, the two-hour roleplaying games extend the Doctor Who universe and are understood to be BBC Multiplatform's most expensive commission to date (it won't reveal the figures). "There are 17 episodes in the new series of Doctor Who this year, four of which are interactive," explains 39-year-old Anwen Aspden, executive producer at BBC Wales Online who is responsible for delivering the games. "The show's lead writer and executive producer, Steven Moffat, wanted to do something big and innovative, and they're his vision: the games are part of the Doctor Who canon and all the writers are from Who. But they can also stand alone."
Of course, Doctor Who has dabbled in multiplatform before. Beginning with a tie-in annual in 1964, the story has spread to LPs, radio, film, comics, novels, games, merchandise, animation, metasites and other online exercises. But transmedia also demands that narratives cohere, and this is where many previous efforts failed. The TV series and The Adventure Games share a continuity -- take the interior of the TARDIS. The set designers built a staircase and a door that can be seen in the background in the TV show but aren't used. In the game, they will be integral to the plot. The Adventure Game also showcases the remodelled Daleks, and the content of these RPGs will impact future stories, says Phil Ford, the 49-year-old screenwriter from Staffordshire who penned three of the games. "Skaro [the Daleks' home planet] and Kaalann, the city of the Daleks in the game, are what they would have to look like if we went back to them on television."
The games also connect with Doctor Who's past. Not only does the first instalment reference the Doctor's time on Earth in 1963, the year in which the programme first aired, but they will resurrect "something from the Patrick Troughton era [1966--69] that I don't think has been seen since".
It doesn't stop there. In May, Moffat announced he's taking the TARDIS to the stage with Doctor Who Live, a production featuring more "brand-new screen material for Matt Smith's Doctor" in video sequences. Follow him to this new dimension from October 8.
Learn more about transmedia in our cover story, Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
