PRODUCTION DESIGNER PHIL SIMS WELCOMES SFX TO THE TARDIS
seems to stand still when you’re inside the TARDIS. Because it’s so mind-boggling and, quite frankly, overwhelming to step into – especially when you’re doing so before it’s been seen on television.
It’s housed in Stage 6 at Wolf Studios in Cardiff – the biggest of them all. What you see on screen is all actually there physically. It’s housed up metal steps, accessible via two flights, where the Police Box doors welcome you (and us, the first non-licensed publication on set) to the console room. It’s enormous. When you hear it described as “cathedral-like”, they’re not exaggerating. But apparently that still wasn’t quite enough…
“This is the tallest stage we have, 50 feet tall, and we couldn’t build it to 50 feet because we need to make allowances for lights and structure and things above it,” production designer Phil Sims explains. “But we built it as high as we possibly could. It’s part of the reason that it has a squatter kind of doughnut shape, like a tokamak generator shape.
“We tried a sphere in here that was the circumference of the space, horizontally, but it just broke through the floor and the ceiling of the stage. We didn’t want to have to create lots of visual effects from the top or below. So we squished it down to create this kind of elongated shape, which has worked out really well because it’s more cinematic than if it was just a vertical.”
If you think about how you’re viewing the TARDIS at home, that’s the “missing” wall of the dome. Opposite that is a huge, raised viewing platform to allow for filming.
The set is on two floors but technically there are three tiers – the ground floor, the first floor where the console sits, and then second floors accessible via ramps.
“Russell’s set description for the first time we walked in was, ‘It’s the first time we walk into the TARDIS and it’s a huge spherical cavernous space,’ words to that effect – I’m paraphrasing, although they should be welded into my mind, the amount I read it.
“We started playing with models and illustrations. We were going along a different tack where we got lots of triangular panels with roundels interlinked in the old hexagonal arrangeme
