NARRATOR: In 1974, this brand-new title sequence burst onto our screens.
It was the first time the viewers at home got to journey through the time vortex every Saturday night.
This is the story of the man who turned a ground-breaking Hollywood special effect into the most iconic title sequence in the history of Doctor Who.
Well, I went into television in 1960.
I studied graphic design at Royal College and the options were to go into print design, advertising I'd always been a great film fan, I wouldn't say a film buff.
But my father was actually manager of a cinema, so I practically lived in the place.
Round about the late '50s, Saul Bass, an American, started designing title sequences for films by Otto Preminger, and some by Alfred Hitchcock.
And this was really inspiring because it was graphic design, it was typography.
There were sort of simple graphic shapes, but they were moving.
It gave it a whole new dynamic.
And soon after I left college, doing a little bit of teaching, a job became vacant at the BBC, who advertised for a designer.
So I boarded for the job, and got the job.
The first Doctor Who title sequence, people often ask, you know, how did you conceive the whole idea?
What was your storyboard like?
In fact, it didn't happen that way.
Verity Lambert had come across some footage which was using this weird electronic technique, which they call a howl-round, whereby a camera, an electronic camera, linked to a monitor is sending the signal around in a kind of loop, and then by playing around with various gain controls and contrasts and so on, the image changes and it deteriorates.
It was a property of this particular low resolution, black and white image Orthicon camera that created this thing.
I had a feeling that with all this electronic effect happening, there was no point in making elaborate pieces of type as well.
It needed something simple to generate.
It was the whiteness of that block of type that generated this really weird sort of Rorschach pattern.
I think at the time I did the Patrick Troughton one, the main thing The big difference, of course, was using a face.
During the session with Verity for the first Doctor Who series, one of the, I think it was the PA, stuck his head in front of the camera, because we knew that, you know, the camera, where the caption would go, and this amazing effect happened there.
Verity thought it too was scary, much too scary.
And, well, I kind of filed it away and persuaded, you know, the producer of the Troughton one that, you know, we could use the face.
So we photographed it deliberately with a kind of top light that would give a fairly symmetrical lighting on the features of the face.
I decided to change the type, just sort of fancied using a Times Bold at that time.
The other thing I did there was to use a special kind of film white, which I'd developed, using a piece of polystyrene that had been ripped.
The surface was ripped.
And then when it was lit from the side, it would be completely black until it turned slowly, and then you'd get a raking light from all the little bits of polystyrene until the whole thing went white.
I came to do the first Jon Pertwee Doctor Who title sequence after I left the BBC for a couple of years, and I realised that, first of all, there ought to be a designed logo.
The first two didn't have logos.
They were just simply bits of typesetting, basically.
And I thought that that howl-round technique that we'd been using would be absolutely amazing when we came to do it in colour.
Sadly, it didn't work with the new colour cameras.
We therefore sh*t everything in black and white.
We took a colour photograph of Jon Pertwee, but I used a black and white photograph of him to generate the howl-round technique.
The new producer, Barry Letts, wanted to do a whole completely new kind of title sequence.
You know, we'd had this howl-round technique working for three different versions, and I wanted to do something that was really spatial, gave you a feeling of depth, you know.
Whether it was going to outer space or whether it was going back in time.
And I, like all my colleagues, had been absolutely knocked out by the stargate sequence in Kubrick's 2001.
The Tom Baker title sequence was actually sh*t by a company called General Screen Enterprises.
We used to There was so much graphic work that the two Rostrum cameras inside the BBC always seemed to be booked, and we were allowed to go out to Slough or Maidenhead or Uxbridge to various companies that had the facilities.
I had to find a camera that had a motorised track as well as a motorised bench.
And I think it was probably because I was doing this diamond-shaped tunnel that the idea of a diamond-shaped, pretty well diamond-shaped, logo would work down there.
When we photographed the various Doctors, Troughton, Pertwee, Tom Baker, the important thing from my point of view was getting the lighting so that it would generate the right pattern.
As far as the expression of the face, it needed to be fairly simple, I felt.
If it was going to be used week after week, you needed something fairly staid.
It was interesting when Tom Baker came in and we got this whole thing with I cursed the fact that he had this big curly hair, because I knew that was going to be a real problem to draw a matte around all the hairs, and he had the scarf.
And whereas we were trying to make the thing very symmetrical, the scarf couldn't be symmetrical.
It had to wrap around and fall down one side.
It was, again, a much more interesting image than the other ones, I thought.
I thought the Sid Sutton title sequence worked very well.
I think that, again, it's one of those obvious things that you've got outer space and you've got stars, but it's actually picking up on the obvious which is sometimes the solution, you know, and I thought it worked extremely well.
I was quite surprised to see an earlier logo, the one I designed for the first Jon Pertwee sequence, turn up in a later one for the Paul McGann Doctor Who sequence.
With the new title sequence, I'm slightly flattered by the fact that it's related to the Tom Baker one, the tunnel idea.
You know, the Tardis seems to be the obvious thing to use.
They don't use faces, but I imagine there's a very good practical reason for that.
They've already changed Doctor Who, and it means that it will last through quite a few different permutations of Doctors.
If I was doing the Tom Baker title sequence again, I would sit down and think very hard for a long while.
Because the possibilities with a computer are so great, I would certainly get away from the rigidity of the tunnel.
Even if I used a spatial tunnel I mean, when people talk about, you know, black holes and the way light is stretched and shrunk I mean, it just opens up the possibility that you could take something which is, maybe, various layers in horizontal planes which are then bent and turned into tunnels.
The chances for metamorphosis, you know, are enormous.
To create this sequence, we use a technique called slit-scan.
This is This was typical of the kind of camera we used.
A Rostrum camera, also know as an animation stand, used mainly for filming ordinary, conventional animation.
sh**ting down onto drawings, photographs and so on.
And it would normally sh**t a sequence of frames while it's moving.
But for this technique, which relies on a long time exposure, we would have the camera locked on one frame.
The whole background has to be completely opaque, except for this slot which lets the light through from the light box.
And behind that, we have a pattern which is created by sticking down strips of polythene.
These are just strips of torn polythene bags.
But by putting a polarizing filter behind that, and another polarizing filter underneath the camera, and having one cross at 90 degrees, the background goes black and the stress in the polythene shows up as a series of rainbow colours.
And this is the pattern that is slowly moving through the slot that creates the walls of the tunnel.
It started out very, very close inside a specially drawn slot, and then it would track away up the column.
So the combination of that bench moving with the polythene pattern and the camera tracking gives us one frame.
The next frame is almost identical.
The very slight difference is the position in which this table moves.
It would start possibly It was probably in the region of a tenth of an inch further back, and the next frame, again, the increment will be the same.
We get a Tardis-shaped tunnel by having an outline of the Tardis, and a diamond-shaped tunnel gives us our diamond corridor that we have at the end of the sequence.
And the circular tunnel, of course, with the silver pattern running through.
In the case of the Jon Pertwee sequence, we had a Jon Pertwee-shaped tunnel made from a tracing of the full-length photograph.
So to get the Tardis police box actually moving down the corridor, we used a photograph, and this photograph was the one from which the tracing of the outline was made, which generated the corridor.
And we simply tracked down in a conventional way, sh**ting continuously for that one.
The same applies to the end logo.
The logo is set in a diamond badge, and the diamond relates to the corridor, because the tracing of the outline of this diamond relates to the slot which created that corridor.
To get Tom Baker's face into the sequence was more problematic.
Because it's a full photograph, by using the long time exposure, the whole thing would over-expose and burn up.
So what I did was use a dot screen, which you put over the face, so that what we are in fact sh**ting are a series of dots which have got the colour of that photograph underneath.
We also used a motorised polarizing device on the top.
So that when we start off close up, the camera sees nothing but black.
As it's tracking, the image is gradually revealed.
And by the time it's reached the full height and we get the whole of the photograph, we see the full thing with these tapering streaks of light.
To get a kind of rich transition through to the logo, I used a negative photograph contrast of the Doctor, and underneath, in fact, was some coloured gels and layers of tracing paper.
Softly diffused, but basically that was the kind of image.
And that was probably seen in the sequence for less than a second, but it just helped the transition through.
After 30 years, examining it frame by frame, trying to decide exactly how I did it, I realise how much anguish went into it.
So I'm quite pleased that it still stands up.