Doctor Who: 14 Cool Details Revealed In Steven Moffat's Wedding Of River Song Commentary

2. The Wedding Scene Was Filmed In Front Of A Painted Backdrop

Doctor Who The Wedding Of River Song the Doctor Matt Smith
BBC

Spoilers! The Wedding Of River Song does in fact include a wedding. A wedding between River Song and the Doctor. Absolute shocker.

Jokes aside, the scene itself is beautifully acted by Smith and Kingston, with intimacy and heart galore. It also looks really stunning too, and that's mainly because of a key creative decision that Webb made about how to film it.

Rather than using a green screen background (like the Lake Silencio scene) the wedding scene was actually filmed in front of a painted backdrop. That starry sky you see here? That's a real painting, which is probably why it looks so damn good.

Webb notes that they simply lacked the budget to afford a green screen shot, but because the wedding scene looks undeniably better than the lakeside scene, this is proof that you don't always need tons of cash to produce a great result.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!