03x05 - Making Manhattan

[bunniefuu]

It's an expl*sive conclusion
for the Doctor's New York story,

but going out on a high wasn't easy.

Join Confidential, as we
strip the Big Apple to its core

and show you how the
Doctor Who team made Manhattan.

It's hard to do s New York
in Cardiff, let's be honest.

The big challenge of the episode was
making it feel authentic and making
it feel like New York

so to go over there and sh**t
plate sh*ts and be able

to blend the real New York with
bits of Cardiff, it makes that
episode just feel that more epic.

It's actually easier to go and get a
sh*t of the real city where the shape

of the city, and the grids and the
angles you need to see it from,
actually exist and then paint

that picture to look like the s,
but we ended up
sending an effects crew

and the director, James Strong,
and Confidential over to New York
where they got the right angles.

They just got beautiful, clean sh*ts
of the Statue of Liberty, sh*ts of
Central Park, that sort of stuff.

It's like Doctor Who,
in New York, in . Brilliant!

It's deliberately ambitious
to set a story in New York,

and I didn't know how far
we could go,

but again with this design team

and this effects team, you set
something rolling and off they go and
they grab it and they run with it.

Travelling Stateside,

the Doctor Who production team are
in Manhattan to marvel at the
New York skyline,

certain that if they can make it
there, they can make it anywhere.

♪ I don't like cities

♪ But I like New York

♪ Other cities always make me mad

♪ Other places always make me sad

♪ No other city ever made me glad
except New York

♪ I love New York... ♪

SIRENS
Do you want to paint that building
at the back, just black?

Which one? On the monitor, you see
the small one that that's against?

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

We've come to Central Park
which is where

we are saying, well, where
Hooverville was based at the time

and so we've...obviously,
it's not here any more,
so we've had to sh**t plates

of Central Park and buildings,
if you look they're period
buildings, a lot of which

haven't changed since the ' s
and we are going to construct
a kind of collage, if you like.

We are painting out
the modern buildings
and leaving the ' s buildings

and then adding the
Empire State Building into the sh*t.

It's most important to get the
buildings coming up out of the trees,

so we have got to be quite specific
about which places

we pick to film our plate sh*ts
today.

We want the trees so that we can
cut around them and put
the Cardiff trees in, essentially.

Yeah, they are easy to cut out and
paste into a... I mean,
again we will use the tree line,

wherever we film in Cardiff, we're
going to film in Cardiff in a park,

we'll paint these trees and
these period buildings in.

Behind me is the beautiful
Sheep Meadow of Central Park

so we'll have all of our
action taking place with the Doctor
and Martha walking through,

and it
will look like it's part of this
massive landscape behind us.

It's going to work, Dave, isn't it?
Tell me it'll work.

We're going to put the TARDIS right
the way in the middle of the lawn,

in Cardiff, and then it's going
to be magically put here in
front of the Statue of Liberty.

Because we only have a limited
number of special effects sh*ts,

we have had to find a
piece of wall up in Cardiff

which matches the
base of the statue.

We'll film them
against green screens

and then put them in and
it'll look like the Tardis
really has landed here.

Manhattan's over there,
the most beautiful view
on a gorgeous sunny day.

I am sitting here thinking,
"How are we going to match
this in Cardiff, in November?"

But hey, we need a lot of luck.

But luck was on their side,

in the small town called Penarth.

And the Welsh weather is perfect.

We're a month later, it's a month
since we sh*t those plate sh*ts
in New York

and the weather is EXACTLY
the same today as it was that day.

It's gob-smacking because
it's been raining for two weeks here.

This is actually a fantastic match
for the base
of the Statue of Liberty.

The brick on the wall here
is almost identical.

We looked at every piece of wall
and brick in Cardiff

to find this,
and then there's the grass in front,
and so when we jump back

and paste this into the real plates
of the Statue Of Liberty, it's going
to be a fantastically easy match.

And, ACTION!

Anywhere else, I might worry
about them, but New York?

It's what this city's good at.

Give me your tired, your poor, your
huddled masses and maybe the odd
pig sl*ve Dalek mutant hybrid too.

The pig and the showgirl.

The pig and the showgirl.

Just proves it, I suppose.

There's someone for everyone.

There's a bit of ill feeling
around this morning

because everybody's really annoyed
that we got to go to the real place,

and here they are in Cardiff, trying
to recreate the magic of New York.

Sorry, sorry,
could I just point out...?

Our lovely producer, Phil,
and our director, James,
and our visual effects man, Dave,

and some of the
Doctor Who Confidential crew all
got a nice weekend in Manhattan.

We are in a car park
at Penarth Leisure Centre!

Draw your own conclusions.

I'm ashamed!

And a local dog just
did a wee on the TARDIS.

To make matters worse,

we've got to mix
an overlay monitor with all our plate
sh*ts of the real Statue of Liberty.

We put actors against green screen,
then put the real view behind it,
so it looks like

they're looking out over Manhattan.

All the stuff we sh*t with David and
Freema today will match exactly
what we sh*t in New York

so it couldn't be better,
it couldn't be more perfect,
it's brilliant.

Our sets tend to fall
into two categories.

Sets that we build from scratch,
you know,

that carpenters build and
set decorators paint the walls of,
and install the electricity into etc

or locations that we go to
and transform into something,
and that's a perfect example of that.

Back at Bude Park,
home to Hooverville,
there's a charged atmosphere

for what promises to be
a very expl*sive night ahead.

This is called,
we call it "det cord",

it's a high expl*sive as an igniter
cord, but we wrap it around petrol

and when it goes off, it just creates
a really clean, nice, big fireball.

Like any high expl*sive,
it obviously sends a shock wave
and it's very dangerous.

The secret of special effects
is timing.

This back pot...

is going to be a big ball of flame,
angled straight up.

We're going to do it with pyro,
with petrol, you're f*ring
straight up into the air

to debris pushing towards that camera
that's going to be over there,
and over there as well.

And as well as that,
we've got this shed,

which is just gonna
sort of blow outwards.

Potentially maybe
the fireball behind it as well,

timed in, so it looks like
the expl*si*n has pushed it forward.

Guy is going to be starting

from back here, so on "action",

Guy's going to be
running, running, running.

Kim and Andy take their own timing.

As soon as Guy's on here,
bounces up, then you hit the button.

I hit the button.Danny, you det then, yeah?

Camera's over here, the expl*si*n's
there and the Dalek's
up in the sky...

..and then our stuntmen
will all fly towards us.

So we'll have yours locked off,
obviously, and then we'll have
two other cameras kind of on it.

Yep. Elsewhere,

Two Daleks in the sky.

Ready?

The humans will surrender!

OK.CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Let's put the fires out,
everybody stay where they are.
Guy, are you OK?

That went bang, didn't it?!
Quite happy with that, that was good.
Very good.

The weather has been great
so it's been a clear night
and it's gone all right so far.

The expl*si*n stuff
went really well.

Cardiff and New York have been
on an exchange like no other,
and for two episodes,

the Doctor Who team have faced
extraordinary challenges bringing
the Big Apple to the small screen.

I'm incredibly pleased with the way
they turned out. They do look epic.

I think you feel as if you are
in a world unlike any other
that we've visited.

It's real! You think,
"My God, they're really there!"

Lovely. Really lovely.