Doctor Who Series 9 Episode 2: The Witch’s Familiar

Number of shots: 90
Duration of production: May-July 2015 (3 months)

Key challenges included:
Skaro
Milk designed and created a full CG environment to represent the Dalek city on the planet Skaro. Milk built the city asset as a 3D asset created in Cinema 4D, which allowed fly over and fly through shots and it was used later to establish Skaro geography. Milk created concept designs based on vintage Doctor Who comics from the 1960s.

The Director
Hettie McDonald wanted to achieve a realistic feel so that the audience imagined they were in the city. Milk populated the Dalek city environment with Daleks flying, moving around and interacting with each other and the environment. This was achieved by setting up a particle simulation with basic rules and behaviour patterns and then instancing detailed Dalek geometry onto the points at render time.

The Milk compositing team then integrated the Dalek city into the live action plates shot on location in Tenerife.

The Doctor attacked by snakes
Milk created full CG snakes that attack the Doctor, coiling around his body to restrain him. We needed to obtain a very accurate body track of Peter Capaldi’s movements as he tries to resist them. Milk hand animated some “hero” snakes – to work with Capaldi’s movements – in key areas with the main mass being dealt with as a simulation based task. This was done by flowing particles across the surface of the body track to produce curves that controlled the high-resolution snake geometry.

Software used:
Nuke
Houdini
Maya
Rendering in Arnold
Photoscan
Cinema 4D
Photoshop