# Doctor Who 50 years trailer

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 3D bullet time sequence through a frozen landscape filled with images from Doctor Who'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 (Matt Smith) narration talks about him running "all my lives" from "the day of the Doctor". The trailer ends with the hashtag #SaveTheDay.

## Filming and production

Red Bee Media, which had previously produced trailers for Doctor Who such as the 2008 campfire trailer, was hired to work on a special trailer for the fiftieth anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor". It was directed by Matt Losasso and produced by Carrie Hart, with sound design provided by String and Tins. Red Bee Media conceived the basic outline 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 Stage 1 of Black Island Studios in London. The original costumes and props were supervised by Andrew Beech. During filming, actors were hired to pose as the key characters, over whom the features of the original actors were placed:
* Andy McInnes as the First Doctor
* Stephen Rose as the Second Doctor
* Jon Crowley as the Third Doctor
* Paul Hughes as the Fourth Doctor
* Nic Zabilowicz as the Fifth Doctor
* Chris Laurens as the Sixth Doctor
* Jim Ewan as the War Doctor
* Robert Ratajczak as the Ninth Doctor
* Josh Sutherland as the Tenth Doctor
* Jan Hoffman as the Eleventh Doctor
* Ami Kandel as Clara Oswald and Sarah Jane Smith
* Robert David Cashin as the Master
* Natalie Wood as Rose Tyler
* Bella Sabbagh as Donna Noble
* Naomi Delrme as Amy Pond
* Valona Irons as Martha Jones
* Joseph Paxton as the policeman
* Michael Pearson as the soldier and the Dalek victim
The images of Matt Smith (Eleventh Doctor) and Jenna Coleman (Clara Oswald) were captured on 2 September 2013 in London, while Smith's narration was recorded on 5 October during recording of "The Time of the Doctor". 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 (First Doctor) is the first image of the actor to be presented in high-resolution colour. To create the image, Losasso sourced a black-and-white image from the episode The Web Planet (1965), and spent hours placing elements from a double over the top of the original still in Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the image to colour. Following this, Framestore visual 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.

## Release and reception

The BBC announced the trailer on 19 October 2013 alongside a promotional image of all eleven Doctors. The trailer aired on BBC One the same day at approximately 8:20 p.m., after Strictly Come Dancing, and was subsequently released on YouTube. The Verge's Ellis Hamburger called it "essential viewing for any Doctor Who fan", and Radio Times felt it "was the sort of thing that could only have been made for a fanbase as fervent as Doctor Who's". #SaveTheDay trended on Twitter after the trailer was released, and the video received almost one million views on YouTube within two days.