Gary Russell has a long history with Doctor Who, having edited Doctor Who magazine, produced Doctor Who audio adventures, written Doctor Who books, and directed the Doctor Who animated serial, The Infinite Quest. He has now directed another Who animated adventure, Dreamland, set in Area 51. After showing over six parts on the BBC’s Red Button service, Dreamland airs in its entirety on 5 December 2009. Russell tells us more…

How long did Dreamland take to complete?

We began work on the initial scripting ideas during Winter 2008, and had the finalised script by April, so we could record with David between his Doctor Who: End of Time and The Sarah Jane Adventures commitments.

We had LittleLoud, our animation house, in place by May and it was all systems go once the voice recording had taken place. About four hours ago, I watched the almost-but-not-quite final pass of the last episode! And it was brilliant!

How does it differ from the previous Doctor Who animation you worked on, Infinite Quest?

Well, The Infinite Quest was a whole different style of storytelling. We wanted to do a quest-based adventure that would take us to different locations, with different characters week by week, so the Doctor and Martha were the only real constants, and the story was topped and tailed by the villain, Baltazar.

For Dreamland, we opted to go the more traditional route of a single story across the weeks, but in a very untraditional manner, with a wholly different style of animation that would lend itself to the scope and vistas that Phil Ford’s script required.

For The Infinite Quest we went down a straightforward classic 2D animation style, with 3D modelling for locations and machinery. But for Dreamland, we’ve gone the whole 3D hog, with camera movement, panoramic sweeps and character movement developed from a more computer games-based ethic.

Was the project specially timed for David Tennant’s last year, or was it something that was talked about earlier?

We talked about doing more animation as soon as we’d finished The Infinite Quest but as always, these things take time.

What Dreamland did offer us, by means of its timeframe, was the ability to have it set during the Specials, specifically between Waters of Mars and The End of Time, so the Doctor is alone, maybe even lonely, looking for an adventure to get his teeth into and cheer himself up a bit. This gave us a great opportunity to create Cassie Rice and Jimmy Stalkinghorse as ‘companions’ for the adventure.

What can you do with an animated show that you can’t do with live action?

Well, like all mediums, everything offers something unique, whether it’s TV, comics, audio, prose or animation. They all offer restrictions, too. What animation does give us is scope, is the ability to say ’Let’s set Dreamland in 1950s New Mexico, with giant insectoids, flying brains and fleets of tanks, helicopters and explosions’ – all things it would be far more difficult to do in live action.

There’s often a temptation to say, let’s have 50,000 Viperox and 600 tanks cos, again, you can’t easily do that on a TV budget but in animation, the sky’s the limit... But actually, that’s a bad idea, because it takes away from the storytelling. More is rarely better in good television. It’s far better to focus on making things look good and believable than flood your eyes with quantity. Because if you do that, it just looks, and sounds, a mess. But it’s very tempting…

My background is in audio drama, and the same rules apply. 6000 Daleks coming over the horizon sounds great and freeing but, in reality, is confusing and dull – it ceases to be spectacle and becomes too much to take in. It’s a great restraint I’ve learned from Russell T Davies, rein it back and make it believable, not stupid.

There were rumours of an animated Who series in the early 90s. Do you think that could have worked at that point?

If the scripts were good and the people behind it understood smart drama that appeals to a family audience, I don’t see why not.

Bearing in mind the success of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, do you think Doctor Who would work as an ongoing animated series now?

Maybe, although you’d have a work very hard to keep finding stories to do that justified the animation and didn’t just duplicate what was being told in the main series. I think it would be a challenge. I like challenges like that, though…

You’ve worked on Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. What are the differences in working for each?

It’s all about good stories, good drama and good actors. We’ve been blessed across these shows to have the likes of Russell, Chris Chibnall, Phil Ford and Steven Moffat steering us. You don’t get better than that.

Are we likely to see a Dreamland-style animated adventure for Sarah Jane in the future?

Now that would be cool!

Dreamland airs in its entirety on BBC Two on 5 December 2009.