Film and television science fiction and fantasy today tends to exist in ‘universes’–the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), DC Universe (DCU) and the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU)–where different stories and characters extend out from a central concept over various media. Doctor Who, the long-running BBC saga of time and space, has slowly built its own connected worlds over the years, now called the Whoniverse, which expanded further this month with The War Between the Land and the Sea.
The mini-series, which concludes this Sunday (21st December) on BBC One, sees the titular underwater reptiles of the 1972 Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils, who ruled Earth long before humans, return to reclaim the planet and make humanity pay for polluting the seas. In the absence of the Doctor, saving the world falls to UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce), a defence force against alien invasion that first appeared in the main series during the 1960s.
The War Between… was created by current Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, who wrote episodes one and five, with the other three written by Pete McTighe. According to Joel Collins, executive producer overseeing production design and effects, Davies came up with the first episode over four years ago. “What we’ve made now is very much what I read back then,” he says. “The tone of the show was on the page; an epic, quite mature and poignant science fiction fantasy based around an everyman.”
That core figure is Barclay (Russell Tovey), a lowly UNIT employee who, through a bureaucratic mix-up, becomes key in ending the conflict between humans and Homo Aqua (the 21st century name for the Sea Devils). Initially a background member of the negotiating team in the imposing Empress Hall, where a giant tank has been constructed for the Aquakind delegation, Barclay is suddenly and dramatically elevated to being Earth’s spokesperson at the insistence of Homo Aqua ambassador, Salt (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
Collins comments that many people have assumed Empress Hall is a real building in London, when, in fact, the exterior was created in CGI. “It pretty much ended up being a CGI London for some of it,” he says. “Empress Hall is a central piece of the story and it was a very complicated thing to get right. The interior is a set built at Wolf Studios in Cardiff, but a lot of people presumed we had found a big empty hall.”
Visual effects supervisor Sebastian Barker, managing partner of Automatik VFX, praises the set design by production designers Julian Luxton and Erica McEwan, which included the main room up to the balcony and the airlock of the tank. “Behind the airlock, we projected a pre-rendered CG tank interior and rear room on an LED wall,” he explains. “This meant the close-ups of Salt and the Homo Aqua could be achieved ‘in-camera’, live and on set. For any wider shot of the room, we took over in CG, rendering the tank, back room and upper half of the main room, using the LED wall to convincingly light the set.”
Diplomacy later shifted underwater to Aquakind’s domain, which Barclay and his fellow ambassadors reach in a diving bell. This vessel creaks and groans during the descent, an effect achieved through, explains sound designer Steve Browell, “pitch bends, irregular rhythms and sudden dropouts” to make the structure feel unreliable. “The submersible’s sounds were designed to feel reactive to pressure, bending and groaning under the weight of the surrounding ocean,” he says. “Silence was used strategically throughout the descent so that when the sound returned it felt heavier and more threatening.”
When the humans reach the seabed, they find their hosts have created a structure where they can move freely without breathing gear. Browell describes this as a “living membrane that breathes, shifts and presses in on everything within it.” To achieve this, real-world recordings were slowed down, stretched and distorted; these were mixed, in what Browell describes as a tribute to the sound designers on the original Doctor Who series working within the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with tone generators, reel-to-reel tape manipulation and modular synthesis. “By blending organic sources with electronically generated tones, the environment takes on a breathing quality,” he explains, “swelling, contracting and pulsing as though it has its own internal life.”
The space of Aqua World was also a mix of the physical and digital. “The initial spaces Barclay and the team land in after their sub journey were largely practical,” says Barker. “VFX were used to replace the ceilings and add a sense of organic, cellular movement, the idea being that the Homo Aqua had somehow grown the structure across the Mariana Trench with organic matter. We then transition into a full CGI/VFX environment for the diplomatic chamber later. The space was huge so, sadly, there was no way we could realistically build anything practically.”
Aquakind was designed by Neil Gordon with his team at Millennium FX and Dan May at VFX agency Painting Practice. Barker explains that the finished suits were then 3D-scanned before going through a process of animation development. “Understanding how the gills and ears might move fed into how the animators conveyed different emotions with subtly in movement,” he says. “This was especially prevalent in the case of Salt, [adding] small flicks of the ears to complement Gugu’s performance and help convey a range of emotions.”
While Salt speaks English with no discernible processing, the Homo Aquans who first appear in episode one speak their own language, which is translated using a software programme developed by UNIT. In designing this new voice, Browell says there was a “strong desire” to honour the original creature sound from classic Doctor Who, which was created using a “simple, vintage” modulation effect. During the design process, Joel Collins recorded himself on his phone making a series of clicking noises, which he sent to Browell. “Joel gave an excellent performance of clicks, which became part of the core palette for the new Aquakind voice,” Browell says. “Those were combined with other vocal and textural elements, influenced by real marine animals – porpoises, dolphins and penguins – focusing on clicks, hisses and short bursts of sound. All the work was carried out in Pro Tools using pitch, timing and spectral settings. The goal was to let the original Homo Aqua character, Joel’s performance and modern techniques co-exist.”
Music also plays a major role in creating atmosphere and character in The War Between… Composer Lorne Balfe comments that Russell T Davies and series director Dylan Holmes Williams “were very clear that they wanted the score to fully immerse the audience in the world of Homo Aqua.” Because of this, he says, the music had to feel both “elemental and cinematic”, with the leitmotif for Barclay being the emotional backbone of the score. “His theme is designed to suggest there is a hero within all of us, not through grand gestures but empathy, resilience and choice,” Balfe adds.
As with Doctor Who of all eras, The War Between… has a strong message, in this case about the ecological damage caused by polluting the seas. This is central to episode two, Plastic Apocalypse, in which Homo Aqua send back to the land what was dumped in their environment. Collins observes that the scenes of this happening in London were a mixture of CGI and real rubbish collected by sustainability coordinator Jess Gow (special effects for the whole production were by Real SFX). “We had loads of people running around with lots of plastic and rubbish stuck to them, so we didn’t have to redress them,” he says. “We also had huge crane rigs that were dropping rubbish down, with wind machine blowing it around. The heavier items were CG, because of the danger, but we tried various weights of plastics. Once the scenes were done we did a huge amount of collecting recyclable plastics, which we cleaned and recycled. It was really important that we were trying to tell that bit of the story and not make a mess.”
While there is a flavour of Doctor Who to The War Between… it has a more serious overall approach and is its own thing, with the visuals, sound design and music creating an individual look while still being part of the Whoniverse.
The War Between the Land and the Sea is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
