Doctor Who: Don't Blink

 I have come to admire about the Doctor Who show has been their creative ability to make some of the most brilliantly subtle characters with the budget they have. One of my favorite episodes from the third season is called Blink. This episode I admire on few different levels.

For one this episode barely features either The Doctor or his companion, but rather focuses on the lives of the everyday people that may occasionally find themselves sucked into his world of aliens and monsters. This style of storytelling I'm sure has been done done in one of the previous seasons of Doctor Who. But what makes this one stand out is how the Doctor is remains in background through a series of DVDs that give the present day protagonist the instructions on how to deal with enemies for the episode.

The Full Speech on DVD

But the main thing that I enjoyed about this episode were the Weeping Angels that played the antagonists for the episode. The Weeping Angels are a race of extremely fast aliens that can only move when you're not looking at them. When you do they become frozen in their statute positions as part of a genetic defense mechanism. What makes these angels so terrifying is that whenever you blink at one of them they are able to move closer to you.

At first I thought the Angels were statutes that the people in production design had created in a variety of posses but I later discovered that they were actually done by actresses. From what I've gathered the make up department made a series of casts on the actresses faces in an array of facial posses: neutral, shock and feral. Afterwards after getting into their stone like costumes, all the parts of their skin that weren't covered already were painted over the various shades of stone grey.

I've come to think of these Angels to be almost like the Xenomorph Aliens from the 1986 Ridley Scott film. The reason I say this is because both of these creatures blend perfectly into the background.

Not sure if there were any in this particular shot
But a lot of them did tend to hide like this

Little changes in expression to keep on your toes.

Making of Walking With Dinosaurs

This post isn't going to be entirely motion graphics related, but there are parts of it that I think are interesting for animation. I'm in a class called History of Life on Earth, we watch movies a bunch of movies about hominins and dinosaurs. Some of the films we watch are really cheesy and terribly made, but last week, we watched the BBC America series Walking With Dinosaurs. While watching one class, I was looking at how realistic everything looked and wondered how it had been made. Coincidently, the very next class we watched a DVD extra about the making of the series, and I think I was the most fascinated I have ever been during this class. So much went into making the series, from finding locations that could match prehistorically, to recreating the dinosaurs and everything. I was unable to find the entire video shown, but I was able to find some of the parts online.

Obviously, they had to use animated dinosaurs. so to do this they made models that they then scanned and animated. But even after they did this, they then had to determine exactly how to make the creatures move and move realistically. So to do this, they studied living animals and tried to copy their movements.

scanning the models

studying how they walk

But for the close ups of the dinosaurs, they actually used animatronics and models.

There were other parts that I just couldn't find video of, but showed how they found the locations to film at and then how they had to almost predict what they were going to have the dinosaurs do. If a dinosaur was going to walk through water, they had to throw logs and rocks into the water to make the splashes that would have been there. The video also showed the process of then putting the animated dinosaurs into the shots, and how they then had to manipulate the lighting and colors to make the scenes look realistic, similar to what we are doing now with our scenes.

Not only was it fascinating to watch it, but also to watch how the paleontologists, film makers, and animators all had to work together to make a realistic series.