As lead prosthetics artist on Doctor Who, Neill Gorton has created creatures from every corner of time and space. "But the hardest thing is making realistic people," says Gorton.

Case in point: the recent scene in which he had to artificially age Matt Smith's eleventh Doctor for his regeneration into the twelfth, played by Peter Capaldi. "It was a lot of pressure," he says. "Nobody knows what an alien looks like, so no one can say it's wrong. But Matt's regeneration was the climax of his years on the show -- if it had looked rubbish, it would have been a disaster."

An avid Whovian as a child, Gorton began his special-effects career on horror films such as Hellraiser II before moving on to Hollywood projects like Saving Private Ryan. His Chesham-based studio, Millennium FX, has produced the monsters for Doctor Who since its return in 2004; Gorton himself helped to reintroduce classic monsters from the Daleks to the Zygons.

For the eighth series, which started in August, he is now redesigning monsters he rebooted just a few years ago -- including the iconic Cybermen. "When we redesigned them in 2006, we took a body mould, sculpted the whole thing in clay and cast each part in foam," says Gorton, 44. "But if you really scrutinise the Cybermen we did [then], you'll see there is a lot of variance."

So for the new series, Gorton's team sculpted one half of a Cyberman suit, then laser-scanned it and created a second, identical half using 3D modelling software. The armour was then milled from high-density foam. "Now we have a figure that is completely symmetrical," he says. "It takes out a lot of guesswork."

The new creatures, says Gorton, reflect a change in tone for the series. "Peter [Capaldi] is older, so I think the whole show will be a bit more grown up," he says. Not Gorton, though -- he's building himself a Dalek between filming. "As a kid, I always wanted to have one," he says. "And now I can."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK