"Right then, Rose Tyler, you tell me, where do you want to go'?" "Backwards or forwards in time'?" " It's your choice." "What's it going to be'?" " Forwards." "If Doctor Who is gonna work, then let's go for it." "Let's send them into the far future and have spaceships and a million monsters and, you know, we live or die by that." "This is the year 5.5/Apple/26." "Five billion years in your future." "And this is the day..." "This is the day the sun expands." "Welcome to the end of the world." "Cut." "With episode two set entirely on a space station, there's no better time to meet some new alien life forms." "Guests are reminded that Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation and religion." "So when it says guests, does that mean people'?" "Depends what you mean by people." " I mean, people." "What do you mean'?" " Aliens." "We wanted it to be a kind of hotel for the poshest, richest and most influential aliens in the universe." "Please welcome The Face of Boe." "So we wanted to have a little taster of what these creatures might look like." "And these creatures come in all shapes and sizes." "We've got the Moxx of Balhoon, who's a kind of grumpy little terrier who's got these little folds of skin which kind of hang down." "We started off thinking about his voice." "Because to start with, he was going to be an animated character and then he became a glove puppet for a while and then we decided, no, we wanted him to be kind of something a bit chunkier." "So we gave him this big kind of bum-type headpiece and a grumpy little face." "And we gave him these sharp, silver teeth to make him look like a dog." "And when he greets Rose, his form of greeting is he kind of gathers his spit and then he spits in her eye." "The Moxx of Balhoon." "My felicitations upon this historical happenstance." "I bring you the gift of bodily salivas." "Action!" "Getting the Moxx to glide effortlessly around has a surprisingly low-tech solution." "But even the simplest ideas are fraught with problems." " Cut there." " That's what it's all about." "Now, might I introduce the next honored guest, representing the Forest of Cheem, we have Trees, namely Jabe, Lute and Coffa." "The original sketches that we came up with for Jabe involved her having quite a bark-like skin and quite a pointy nose." "In the end, we went through all the trees, we kind of talked about," ""Is she an oak'?" "No." "Is she an ash'?" "No."" "And in the end, we decided that she was going to be a silver birch." "So that's why she had this, kind of, quite smooth and shiny skin." "I don't want to call us monsters because we're not monstrous." "We are just different." "I feel like I've got a crown." "I'm having my crown of flowers on now." "And I've got a brilliant costume." "It's like a robe, it's beautiful." "Beautiful dress with lots of corseting." "And that immediately gives you the posture." "She's a queen-like figure, I think." "So, as soon as you step into that, and with all of this, you're the part instantly." "Earth death in two minutes." "But great aliens need a stage to match." "There's a scene set in the space station's ventilation chamber... and the Doctor has to get from one side of the walkway to another to turn off a switch to save the day." "Oh, and guess where the switch is." "Shields malfunctioning." "You can only create something like that these days in CGI so you have a partial set with lots of green screen where the Doctor is physically on the walkway." "And this then gets shrunk down and put into a painting, effectively." "I took the actual footage, the shot, reduced it in frame... and then, this is all painted in, along with this here." "So, I mean, it really..." "From that original, sort of, shot, it suddenly becomes..." "Well, it's a classic jeopardy situation, you know." "It suddenly becomes something completely different." "This is ideal for a matte shot." "This is the, sort of, perfect subject." "Five." "Four." "Raise shields!" "One." "Creating the end of the world has tested the graphics team to the limit." "The largest episode is episode two, where there are 203 visual effect shots, which is enormous." "We had eight weeks to create 203 shots." "We virtually created a feature film a month." "Gladiator, for example, there are about 100 effects shots." "And that took nine months." "It's a very expensive episode." "That was absolutely deliberate in writing it." "No episode will ever cost that much ever again or take us that much time." "It's meant to be spectacular." "If you don't remember that one, then we might as well pack up our bags and go home." "Conveying the size and scale of the space station is a feat in itself." "It's a mile long in its own space and needed to be textured, sort of, in a marble-like texture." "It's a very, very good way, in telling a story set in space, to be able to cut outside and travel to a different part of the space station." "Because, obviously, you're filming at a location or a set, so it's fairly static." "We were able to use the model to, sort of, do these lovely, languorous shots of an exterior space station and help tell the story." "In sort of post Star Wars environment, with all the big blockbusters," "I think you find that the public are quite literate when it comes to visual effects." "They don't necessarily know when it's right." "They know when it's not right." "Even with the advent of CGI, you still need some quality performers to bring today's aliens to life." "At least it'll be quick." "The thing with aliens in Doctor Who is there's a danger of relying on them visually." "You just think if we just roll them in with three heads, that's enough." "It isn't." "They all have a relationship with the Doctor and with Rose and they're opportunities for great actors to come in and do great things for the series." "Ladies and gentlemen and Trees and multiforms, the lady Cassandra O'Brien dot Delta 17." "Cassandra is the last human and is effectively a bit of stretched skin on a frame with a mouth and eyes, voiced by Zoé Wanamaker." "My father was a Texan." "My mother was from the Arctic desert." "They were born on the Earth and they were the last to be buried in its soil." "We were wondering, when we first read the script, how we were going to achieve her." "And I think as conversations with the executives and the writer, Russell T. Davies, sort of went on, they wanted something very high quality, she had to be really good." "So the only way we could actually do her is to make a fully CGI animated character." "And she appears for about four minutes in the 45-minute episode of screen time, which is quite long." "Cassandra's basically a shopping trolley... and shooting her was a bit like pushing one of those dodgy trolleys around Tesco's with a, kind of, wobbly wheel." "Oh, now, don't stare." "Zoe Wanamaker, who we cast in the role, wasn't able to be with us on the set." "So we had a stand into, kind of, read in for her." "Look how thin I am." "Thin and dainty." "Getting that emotion into an aluminum frame was a real challenge." "Moisturize me." "Moisturize me." " Cut." "Enough'?" " Very good." "Very good." "I hope that our artists, kind of, were able to respond to how they imagined she would look like." "It's quite a difficult character to get character into because of the fact that she's so flat." "There's nothing there." "There's no shape to the face." "So that was the real challenge with trying to get..." "Trying to get her to look a bit like Zoé, to try and get a feel of that in there, and to make her able to emote like a human, 'cause that is what she is." "The Mill are working themselves to death and are working out of a lot of love for Doctor Who and get an extraordinary creation on screen, which is taking many, many months to do, but she will be brilliant." "Do you think it's cheap looking like this'?" "Flatness costs a fortune." "Five billion years and it still comes down to money." "The series may not always have had the biggest budgets... but no one does aliens quite like Doctor Who."