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Creating the Dalek creature - Radio Times, May 2005 |
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Creative minds gave birth to an alien dependent on the protection of a metal body. Nick Griffiths learns how the vulnerable creature was brought to life.
"Last week's Doctor Who story offered two Who landmarks: the return of the Dalek…and that of the creature inside its casing.
Previous glimpses have, as current special effects and make-up designer Neill Gorton puts it, amounted pretty much to "a blob of green jelly and a bit of tentacle", but last week we saw much more. For the redesign, "we didn't want to go green," says Gorton. "But there was a sense that it should still be a tentacled creature, something very non-human.
"Russell [executive producer Russell T Davies] had a very clear picture in his head and drew a few doodles of something that looked like an octopus with one eye. I went, 'Well, it looks like an octopus, so what if we added a big brain section?' - the idea that it's just this intelligence with very little left of its body. Russell liked it so we ended up with this brainy octopus."
The creature began as a sculpture and was moulded in flesh-like silicone rubber, which is very soft and very similar to the material used in breast implants (don't go getting any ideas, Jordan). Animatronics were added, so that four of its many tentacles can writhe, its eye moves and blinks, and, since there's no mouth, the whole body can pulsate when it speaks.
What you didn't see, though, in the finished episode, was Gorton and two others crouched behind the Dalek, operating its exposed alien. "There were all these cables hanging out of the back of him, going to levers and pulleys," he explains. "Nick [Nicholas Briggs, who provides the voice of the Daleks] was off in one corner with his vibro microphone thingy, doing the Dalek voice, and as he's doing that I'm reading the script, too, making it pulse in time with his dialogue, while another couple of people are making the eye blink and the tentacles wiggle."
You hid behind the sofa. They hid behind the Dalek. Funny old world."
**
Now take a look at our full Doctor Who guide.
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