‘Silo’ production designer Gavin Bocquet on bringing a 144-level silo to life [Exclusive Video Interview]
Based on Hugh Howey‘s novel series of the same name, “Silo” is set in an dystopian future, where people live in a massive underground silo that spans 144 floors. Building that silo first started with a blessing from Howey. “Hugh was very good in the sense that he understands the moving images are a very different way of telling stories than the written word, so we had a lot of freedom in what we produced,” production designer Gavin Bocquet tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Production Design panel (watch the exclusive video interview above).
Along with showrunner Graham Yost and Morten Tyldum, who directed the first three episodes, Bocquet first had to land on the look of the silo. The trio ultimately settled on a gritty, utilitarian style inspired by Eastern Europe. “One of the early references from everybody was a sort of East European, Russian-type of ’50s, ’60s architecture, maybe in concrete, maybe in a sort of robust material. We did do a concept that added a lot of metal support structures within the silo, but it became very easy to turn it into a sci-fi spaceship type of look, so we soon went away from that,” Bocquet reveals. “We all agreed that this robust, concrete, heavy architecture would work well in that world.”
Furthermore, the concrete would be versatile in depicting the different socioeconomic statuses throughout the levels. “There was a lot of opportunity for aging, which was very important in a mile-deep silo to try to give a different idea to what levels you were on. Obviously the lower levels being much wetter and damper and more distressed than the upper levels.”
SEE ‘Silo’ visual effects supervisor Daniel Rachwerger: ‘I want the silo to be a character in the show’
Needless to say, Bocquet and his team did not build a 144-level silo. Instead, they constructed two levels in a 40-foot high old storage facility with a staircase connecting them. The staircase is the low-key star of the show as much of the action takes place on or around it and residents can only travel by foot, so it could take days to walk the silo from top to bottom or vice versa.
“We knew the shaft and the staircase set was going to be one of the critical areas. There’s a lot of action in that world and it was going to determine an awful lot of the personality of the silo,” Bocquet says. “We had one central staircase that connected from one floor to the next floor, so the directors could continually shoot from one balcony down to the next balcony and around the staircase. But obviously anything wider than that, looking up or looking down or moving through that world, then there’d be a visual effects enhancement.”
The visual effects department was involved from the jump, which was helpful for both teams. “On these types of shows, it’s really critical that the visual effects department supervisor, Daniel Rauchwerger, came on board really early because there’s always that decision of a quite simple question of how much do we build and how much does visual effects build. And there’s never one answer to that. It depends on the scene and the setting and what’s required in that sequence. But obviously having to build maybe 70-plus sets, we knew didn’t really have the budget and the stage space to do all those sets as individual sets complete, certainly on the larger scale ones,” Bocquet states. “Obviously it was a repeating pattern [on the levels] in many cases. That obviously made it, I wouldn’t say simpler for visual effects, but having a repeating pattern going down a mile was easier than a set or environment that was changing every 30 or 40 feet.”
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