Effects

As with Series XI, assorted effects teams were brought in to produce the models, props, make-up and visual effects required to bring Red Dwarf XII to life - from Millennium FX and Avis VFX, to the Magic Camera Company and The Model Unit.

The advances in head-scanning techniques employed to create Robert Llewellyn's Kryten mask in the new series may have led the other cast members to believe they'd get off lightly for Siliconia. But in fact, they were all required to sit in the chair and have their faces cast in the old-fashioned physical way. Whether this was for budgetary reasons or a determination to make sure they all finally had to suffer for once, we'll leave you to decide.

For a rare outdoor-set scene in Timewave, it wasn't deemed necessary to go exploring for a suitable quarry to double as Planet Rimmer - a combination of greenscreen and liberally-sprinked sand meant that the studio interior could do the job just nicely.

It was M-Corp, however, that presented the series with some of its biggest VFX challenges. The sequences in which Lister interacted with invisible objects around the ship were some of the most inventive the show has ever created - and they were achieved not with greenscreen, but by creating Perspex objects (including a block to double as the sofa!) and then painstakingly digitally painting out the detail that remained afterwards. This was to ensure that the lighting and shadow would feel as correct as possible - something that Howard Jones and the Avis team felt wouldn't be the same with greenscreen.

M-Corp also required some complex prosthetics to be created to age up Lister once his life was sapped away by the titular corporation. Make-up designer Vanessa White wanted to ensure that "old" Lister still had a certain amount of "Rasta cool" and a sense of "fun" to him - something that actually fit in well with existing continuity, as his lengthy white dreadlocks put viewers in mind of the elderly Lister seen all the way back in Series I's Future Echoes.