THE DALEKS: IN COLOUR
BEHIND THE SCENES ON BRINGING THE DALEKS: IN COLOUR TO LIFE
TO CELEBRATE 60 YEARS OF Doctor Who, the BBC not only gifted fans a brand-new Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa, but a brand-new way to experience the original: William Hartnell. The Daleks: In Colour, broadcast on BBC Four in November, marked the series’ very first official colourisation. The 1963 story has special significance, being the one that introduced the Doctor’s most notorious enemies, and this month it’s released on disc.
According to lead colourisation artist Rich Tipple, the idea came from Russell T Davies, whose plan upon returning to the show was to “put the entire back catalogue on iPlayer and begin to colourise the archive”. Who executive producers Joel Collins and Phil Collinson sounded out Tipple in early 2022 after they saw some of his unofficial work on YouTube. He had the experience and the contacts to make a full-scale production happen.
The important first step was to assemble a team. Tipple approached Scott Burditt and Kieran Highman – his collaborators on an unreleased colourisation of an episode of 1965 story “The Daleks’ Master Plan” – and Timothy K Brown. Work began on the project in November 2022.
THE ORDEAL So, just how did the four colourists set about regenerating, so to speak, 75 minutes of black and white telly? According to Highman it begins by breaking down each scene into its constituent frames (there are 24 frames in a second), with every fifth or so individually coloured “as if doing a painting on a computer”.
“And then,” Tipple picks up, “you tell some motion interpolation software, ‘This is frame one, this is frame five; crossfade between the two. This is frame five and frame 10; crossfade between the two.’ However, if the camera’s moving in or out, or there’s high motion, it’s going to fall flat on its face. You have to go in and fix it. It’s time-consuming.”
Highman stresses that none of the colour is automatically generated, being “painted into the key frames by the artist.” Early on in the process, Tipple allocated each team member a different location in the story which would be their responsibility to colourise. “That gave us consistency in those frames,” he explains.
Consequently, Brown oversaw the TARDIS control room scenes, Burditt the caves, Highman the jungle, and Tipple the Dalek city. “There’s a really lovely moment where Susan is in the TARDIS and when the doors open you see the jungle outside,” Tipple says. “Kieran did the jungle elements inside Tim’s set.
Consistency, consistency, consistency was basically what we were looking for.”
The team referred to colour photos taken during filming to ensure a degree of continuity between the colours of original costumes and props. However, creative licence was strongl
