The Birth of Modern Doctor Who, Sci-Fi London Festival. 2nd May 2010
A fabulous event entitled The Birth of Modern Doctor Who took place in Piccadilly yesterday.
Part 1: Doctor Who on screen
Directors of Doctor Who from 3 different periods:
Richard Martin: directed 22 episodes of Doctor Who in the 1960s
Andrew Morgan: directed Sylvester McCoy’s first serial and returned to helm the 7th Doctor’s finest hour - Remembrance of the Daleks
Charles Palmer: directed four episodes of Doctor Who, Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code, Human Nature & The Family of Blood.
The conversation was directed by Alex Fitch, Radio journalist, podcaster, film critic, panelborders.com.
From left to right: Richard Martin, Andrew Morgan, Charles Palmer, Alex Fitch (click for bigger)
To try and make sense of it I’ve split the conversation into the Directors rather than topic.
Richard described shooting scenes with the Daleks on cobbled street. Having to lay hardboard so that the Daleks could move, pick it up whenever a long shot was needed. Manoeuvring vey heavy cameras with restrictive angles Richard often choose to place cameras close to the ground but the actors found it confusing. Only allowed 5 cuts and a week to turn around each episode, by Wednesday night Richard would sit up all night with a bottle of scotch and by the morning he would be pissed and there would be a complete camera script. His poor assistant got the job of magically making his scribble into the camera script.
Richard explained that the Dalek scripts described the Daleks as having mechanical arms. He suggested that they be weapons and he apologised for the invention of the sucker!
Andrew was filming at the beginning of the use of computer graphics. One of his first shots was of Bonnie Langford floating in a bubble and he found it very peculiar to shoot but Ben Aronovitch created things that hadn’t been thought of. Andrew had interesting times shooting Remembrance of the Daleks at Kew Bridge Steam Museum and hoping that no aeroplanes would go overhead and end up in shot. He got lucky and the wind was in the other direction for all 3 days. Even into the 80’s the scenes had to be shot in story order.
Andrew’s background was in theatre management before training to be a Producer and deciding that Directing was more interesting.
Charles explained that he accepted the Director role without having seen the script. He knew it was a Russell T Davies script, he hadn’t seen New Who and requested that he be sent DVD’s. He had a difficult time to find a suitable location for Family of Blood because it was set in 1913 and most places need a huge amount a change to remove modern features. They filmed the Scarecrow scenes at Cwm Ifor Farm Caerphilly which was perfect but a long journey from Cardiff which meant they lost shooting time.
Charles had come from the film world and was amazed by how chaotic filming for TV is. It’s very constrained by time and budget with 12-14 days to shoot an episode. He explained how he seeks involvement from the whole technical team, saying “it’s impossible to have all these intelligent people around and not pick their brains”
An audience member asked 'how do you work with actors to decide how to play the really emotional scenes and get great performances?'. The response "Mainly, with an actor like David Tennant you say ‘Action’, you say ‘Cut’ & you say ‘Thank you David’."
When discussing Doctor Who confidential Charles confided that he does worry that it may break the illusion but as it goes out after the show it is ok to look backstage at the working process.
From left to right: Andrew Morgan, Charles Palmer, Alex Fitch / The crowd waiting to go into the event.(click for bigger).
The panel ended to a huge round of applause and we took a quick break before Part 2: Doctor Who off screen. I’ll write this up separately later.
Part 1: Doctor Who on screen
Directors of Doctor Who from 3 different periods:
Richard Martin: directed 22 episodes of Doctor Who in the 1960s
Andrew Morgan: directed Sylvester McCoy’s first serial and returned to helm the 7th Doctor’s finest hour - Remembrance of the Daleks
Charles Palmer: directed four episodes of Doctor Who, Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code, Human Nature & The Family of Blood.
The conversation was directed by Alex Fitch, Radio journalist, podcaster, film critic, panelborders.com.
From left to right: Richard Martin, Andrew Morgan, Charles Palmer, Alex Fitch (click for bigger)
To try and make sense of it I’ve split the conversation into the Directors rather than topic.
Richard described shooting scenes with the Daleks on cobbled street. Having to lay hardboard so that the Daleks could move, pick it up whenever a long shot was needed. Manoeuvring vey heavy cameras with restrictive angles Richard often choose to place cameras close to the ground but the actors found it confusing. Only allowed 5 cuts and a week to turn around each episode, by Wednesday night Richard would sit up all night with a bottle of scotch and by the morning he would be pissed and there would be a complete camera script. His poor assistant got the job of magically making his scribble into the camera script.
Richard explained that the Dalek scripts described the Daleks as having mechanical arms. He suggested that they be weapons and he apologised for the invention of the sucker!
Andrew was filming at the beginning of the use of computer graphics. One of his first shots was of Bonnie Langford floating in a bubble and he found it very peculiar to shoot but Ben Aronovitch created things that hadn’t been thought of. Andrew had interesting times shooting Remembrance of the Daleks at Kew Bridge Steam Museum and hoping that no aeroplanes would go overhead and end up in shot. He got lucky and the wind was in the other direction for all 3 days. Even into the 80’s the scenes had to be shot in story order.
Andrew’s background was in theatre management before training to be a Producer and deciding that Directing was more interesting.
Charles explained that he accepted the Director role without having seen the script. He knew it was a Russell T Davies script, he hadn’t seen New Who and requested that he be sent DVD’s. He had a difficult time to find a suitable location for Family of Blood because it was set in 1913 and most places need a huge amount a change to remove modern features. They filmed the Scarecrow scenes at Cwm Ifor Farm Caerphilly which was perfect but a long journey from Cardiff which meant they lost shooting time.
Charles had come from the film world and was amazed by how chaotic filming for TV is. It’s very constrained by time and budget with 12-14 days to shoot an episode. He explained how he seeks involvement from the whole technical team, saying “it’s impossible to have all these intelligent people around and not pick their brains”
An audience member asked 'how do you work with actors to decide how to play the really emotional scenes and get great performances?'. The response "Mainly, with an actor like David Tennant you say ‘Action’, you say ‘Cut’ & you say ‘Thank you David’."
When discussing Doctor Who confidential Charles confided that he does worry that it may break the illusion but as it goes out after the show it is ok to look backstage at the working process.
From left to right: Andrew Morgan, Charles Palmer, Alex Fitch / The crowd waiting to go into the event.(click for bigger).
The panel ended to a huge round of applause and we took a quick break before Part 2: Doctor Who off screen. I’ll write this up separately later.