The Doctor Who 50 years trailer is a sixty-second television trailer which promoted "The Day of the Doctor", the fiftieth anniversary special episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Filmed across two days in a studio, it stars Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, with multiple other actors providing images and poses of the key characters, over whom features of the original actors would be placed. The trailer premiered on BBC One on 19 October 2013.
Summary
The sixty-second trailer features a 3Dbullet time sequence through a frozen landscape filled with images from the show's history, including the Doctor, many of his companions, and enemies, as well as a multitude of props from the show's episodes. During this, the Eleventh Doctor narration talks about him running "all my lives". The trailer ends as the Doctor reveals the day that he's been running from: "The Day of the Doctor".
Filming and production
, which had previously produced trailers for Doctor Who such as the 2008 campfire trailer, conceived the basic outline for the 50 years trailer, to emphasise the fact that "The Day of the Doctor" would be shown in 3D. Major elements of the trailer were recorded on 15–16 August 2013, at Black Island Studios in London. During filming, actors were hired to pose as the key characters, over whom the features of the original actors would be placed. The actors were:
Michael Pearson as the soldier and the Dalek victim
to be presented in high-resolution colour, a process which took a number of hours to achieve. The images of Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman were captured on 2 September 2013 in London, while Smith's narration was recorded on 5 October. Many of the camera movements were recreated in the software Flame. To do this, the cameras were tracked and stabilised, before being recreated into a stable camera movement. This stable movement allowed the inclusion of more subtle references from the show. The still of William Hartnell is the first image of the actor to be presented in high-resolution colour. To create the image, director Matt Lossaso sourced a black-and-white image from the episode The Web Planet, and spent hours placing elements from a doubleover the top of the original still in Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the image to colour. Following this, Framestorevisual effects supervisor Oliver Bersey added slight edits, before adding subtle 2D manipulations to give a 3D effect. Bersey also created a matte painting of the vast landscape that appears at the end of the trailer.
