An Illusion of Scale - Can You Dig It (Patreon)

Hello again!

One thing that always fascinated me about older science fiction television was how often it implied a scale far beyond what the production could actually afford to show. For this shot, I wanted to lean into the version my brain always imagined as a kid: a genuinely massive excavation site stretching out across the landscape.One of the things that always bothered me a bit in quite a few Dalek stories in the 1960s-1970s is that they'd enslave a bunch of people and make them do a lot of digging. But due to budget constraints, we'd never really see the proper scope of their mining operations.In the 1973 Death to the Daleks TV story I'm basing my animation on, their dig site looks like this:

It's tiny!

The 1960s Dalek movie, Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150AD, had a budget of quarter of a million pounds (which was quite a lot back then!) - much much more than the pathetic three thousand pounds a standard episode of Doctor Who cost in the 60s. As a result of the bigger budget, the dig site is much bigger in the movie:

Some nice matte paintings in the background give it a great sense of scale.

HOWEVER! It should still be be bigger! In the story, the Daleks have conquered the entire planet and turned "the whole of Bedfordshire into a gigantic mining operation."Bedfordshire is about 500 square miles! Obviously they couldn't really do dig site the size of a whole English county with 1960s special effects, but I can imagine it in my head and it looks glorious. Big steel supports and a gaping hole leading down to the Earth's core with thousands of Daleks ...

Anyway, the video above shows how I made my dig site look quite large in scale, mostly by painting a big-looking background, but also by utilising some trickery to copy/paste animated characters around to make a crowd scene that looks "alive" but didn't break the bank. A lot of older effects work functioned the same way using matte paintings, miniatures, repeated extras, the trick was never realism so much as convincing the audience to mentally complete the image.I would have made it even larger, but there are only five Daleks in the story and even with those machine gun attachments I doubt they could quell a slave revolt of thousands of disgruntled workers all stampeding at once, so I kept it somewhat reasonable!

-Paul