PHIL SIMS TALKS HOW THE DOCTOR WHO TEAM BROUGHT THE MEEP AND WR ARTH TO LIFE
WOLF STUDIOS, Cardiff. They should just rent us a room, really. The one we’re in today is jokingly referred to as “the Meeping Room” as it’s filled with concept art from the first two specials, as well as props and costumes including the full-size Jimbo robot. It’s pre-transmission; we have no idea what it is, but we are slightly alarmed at a painting of Donna blowing up…
Today we’re continuing our tour with production designer Phil Sims, who’s showing us a foam Meep head, almost like a half-mask, with no fur, like a Siamese cat. The finished Meep is, obviously, bigger for full face and animatronics. Beside it are a rubbery latex shoe/foot and gloves with very long fingers.
Coming face to face with the Meep, you see it has very reflective glass eyes and is very nice to touch. Yes, of course we stroked the Meep. Who wouldn’t?
THE MEEPs
“We created loads of different silhouettes for the Meep and ideas and in the end, Russell was clear he wanted it to be pretty evocative of the comic,” Sims says. “So we reverted back to this [look], which isn’t exactly like Dave Gibbons’s drawing, but it’s much closer, certainly, than a lot of the other ideas were. This became the hero [look] that we harked back to.”
One design has the Meep looking like the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, which Sims notes is “too happy.”
“Once we established we weren’t going to be doing fully CG creatures, we created a 3D digital concept of the Meep in-house and then worked with Neill Gorton from Millennium FX, who has a great history with the show.
“Neill’s guys then started processing [that] to illustrate the size, so we could work out how big the Meep needed to be. Even in the comic, it looks like it bounces around a little bit in size, but he’s kind of table height.
“We created lots of maquettes, literally stood cardboard cut-outs in the meeting room for everybody to look at and decided on the size. Neill then fleshed out a 3D prototype of the head so we could talk about how we tried to get performance out of the Meep, and how much performance we needed. This wouldn’t really fit on someone’s head, but there’s a place there for the bridge of your nose, so it literally sits like a mask and your mouth’s free underneath.
“Once we’d scaled the Meep down to a size that we could agree on, then we had to work through how we fit it around a person. The point we took away was that we should make sure the person’s head is completely covered. They’re completely in character.
“We didn’t want to do jaw removal, or wrap them in Lycra or anything like that to be removed in post. We wanted to try a process where we
