Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 6 59 Opposite page, above: A Photoshop ® illustration of the Temporal Facility time machine chamber in 2044, drawn by Illustrator Sanford Kong over a digital 3D SketchUp ® model by John Mott. Inset above: The Temporal Facility time machine chamber set with control panels in the foreground, built on stage in Toronto at Cinespace Studios West. © Syfy – Photographs by Ben Mark Holzberg Show runners Terry Matalas, Travis Fickett and Natalie Chaidez responded enthusiastically to my presentation, and so did the studio, NBC/Syfy, so I was off to Toronto to dive into the 12 Monkeys TV series. We were all fans of the original movie and its funky Gilliamesque vibe. But that was 1996, almost twenty years ago. The style had been borrowed by many, and time had moved on. Many of the target demographic would have been infants when the movie came out—a sobering thought—so an esthetic somewhat more rooted in reality would fit the show, with an occasional Gilliam homage here and there. The first things to design were the permanent sets, places for the heroes to inhabit four or five days of each seven-day shooting schedule. Most important of these would be the secure Temporal Facility, deep below an apocalyptic 2044, a place for Jones, the enigmatic head scientist, to refine her time machine and hatch her plans to send volunteers back through time to erase reality. Closely following this would be a safe house in the present, somewhere for Cole and Railly to hide out from the 12 Monkeys and other bad guys. And lastly, somewhere for all those lab sets that I was sure were coming down the pipe. We were going to need some space. Fortunately, NBC had secured the two largest studios at the Cinespace Complex in the West End of Toronto. 30,000 square feet sounded like it would fit the bill, now all I had to do was fill it with steel, wood, paint... and a bit of magic. The pilot, which became episode one, was shot entirely on location in Detroit (designed by Ruth Ammon). The series would be shot in Toronto and primarily onstage. I only had to match one present-day location in a single early episode.