The exact same technique can be used to put miniature spaceships into a full-scale live action scene. We’ve all seen holiday photos where a friend or relative appears to be holding up the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One of the ways they did this in The Ark was through forced perspective.įorced perspective is an optical illusion, a trick of scale. So the pioneers behind those early years of Doctor Who had to be particularly creative when when they wanted to combine miniatures with live action. Setting up a foreground miniature for a later Who story, Inferno (1970) Just think about that for a moment: you have to make a science fiction programme without any electronic means of merging two images together, simple dissolves excepted. (Interesting side note: some of Terminator 2 was shot in a very similar fashion to maximise the number of angles captured in a day.) It’s no wonder that fluffed lines and camera wobbles occasionally marred the show, as there was rarely time for re-takes.īut what’s really hard for anyone with a basic knowledge of visual effects to get their head around today is that, until the Jon Pertwee era began in 1970, there was no chromakey (a.ka. Five cameras would glide around the tightly-packed sets in a carefully choroegraphed dance, with the vision mixer cutting between them in real-time as per the director’s shooting script.

BBC rules strictly limited the number of times the crew could stop taping during the 90 minute recording session, which was to produce a 22 minute episode. In the sixties, each Doctor Who episode was recorded virtually as live on a Friday evening, following a week of rehearsals. Studio floor plan from the very first episode of Doctor Who, showing camera positions (coloured circles) But given the archaic and draconian conditions the series was made under back then, I can only admire the creativity displayed by the director and his team in visualising a script which was scarcely less demanding than a contemporary Who story. It’s easy to look at a TV show that old and laugh at the stilted acting, rubber monsters and crude effects. The other day I watched a 1966 Doctor Who story called The Ark.

Forced perspective in stop motion