SCRIPT TO SCREEN
MR RING-A-DING
He’s Mr Ring-a-Ding, he’ll make your heartbells sing… Just don’t make him laugh! Sure, he’s got an icy cold beam in his heart – but Lux’s creepy cartoon villain was an absolute labour of love for the animators and FX wizards at creative studio Framestore, they tell Paul Kirkley.
From Bond to Barbie, Potter to Paddington, Deadpool to the Dark Knight, Framestore has no shortage of screen icons on its books. But few characters have brought the multi-Oscar-winning visual effects and animation studio as much joy as Mr Ring-a-Ding – the cartoon happy chappie who, in Doctor Who story Lux, finds himself transformed into a malevolent god of light.
“I’m still pinching myself that we got to do this,” beams Ian Spendloff, creative and animation director at Framestore’s UK studio in London. “Like a lot of people in the VFX industry, I grew up with Doctor Who. So being able to combine my love for the show with my love for animation was a real thrill. Directing animation is always fun – but this was something else.
“From our very first call with Russell [T Davies, writer and showrunner], it was clear he has a deep love for animation – and this whole episode is a love letter to the form,” says Ian.
“It’s a dream job for animators,” agrees VFX supervisor Ross Wilkinson. “Being able to explore the entire history of animation, while mixing old school techniques with new tech, was an amazing opportunity. And doing that through a villain was such a unique challenge.”
Because that’s the thing about Mr Ring-a-Ding: while Framestore regularly serves up dragons and demons, and even characters as complex as Mark Ruffalo’s hybrid Hulk/ Bruce Banner in Avengers: Endgame, it’s rare for the main antagonist of a film or TV show to be entirely CG generated – let alone a lovingly hand-drawn animation.
“He’s not just a side character or a background gag – he’s literally the title character of the episode, with loads of personality,” says Ian. “He’s this crazy, happy, fun cartoon character, who’s also really evil. That mercurial nature gave us so much to work with.”
“This is proper animation,” Russell T Davies told DWM last month. “There are cheaper ways of doing animation, and then there’s this, which is the real deal. It’s so beautifully done.”
“We knew from the start that, if we wanted to do this authentically, we’d have to bite the bullet and just do it frame by frame, 25 frames a second, hand-drawn, the same way they’d have done it back in the 1930s,” says Ian, of a character Russell’s script describes as being “like a Fleischer cartoon” – in reference to Fleischer Studios’ animated shorts of the 1930s. “We could have animated it in 3D and given it a 2D look, but you can always tell when it’s not authentic. So we went proper old-school with it.” “Though we’re not literally flicking through bits of paper,” stresses VFX producer Ashlee Turner. “We use a piece of software called TVPaint – which is essentially the same thing, but digitised.”