Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1349602
Vancouver, Canada, allowed the budget to stretch that much further and having the stages and lock-ups in the same building as the production o ce meant there was no location department and basically no transport department. From a designer's perspective, this plan was a dream come true, we get to build everything, and we have complete control over the look. The discussion at that fi rst meeting quickly turned to gravity, how do we create it on the ship so that we aren't trying to oat our actors from wires for the next three seasons. We were both adamant that there shouldn't be some magical button that turned on gravity, like in Star Trek or Star Wars. Dean had hoped there might be some perpetual thrust technology (think The Expanse) available to give a sense of gravity, but once I burst his bubble on that, we settled on needing rotating outriggers. A couple of quick and dirty napkin sketches in the restaurant and we realized that necessity was leading us to a rather beautiful silhouette and that with rotating outriggers we would have a ship that appears constantly in motion. So began a month and a half of close pre- preproduction collaboration with Dean. I was diving deep into research of all things space travel and sketching out ideas on the dining table. Being an old-school hand drafter and not having a drafting board in the house pushed me toward a loose free drawn style which I quite like for this early concept stage. Dean and I would meet at least once a week to go over concepts and drawings. When we had hashed something out, we would bring Dan into the mix and see how the design could be incorporated into the storyline. Those lunches were the standard director- showrunner meetings, an endless back-and-forth conversation, both talking constantly, so it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. I'd just have to wait until a suggestion had gestated long enough to be reborn as one of their own ideas in order to have any input. Luckily, we were all on basically the same page as to the direction that we would be making a scientifi cally accurate space mission, with mainly real world technology and a refi ned private et aesthetic. Dan had already written solid synopses for the fi rst ten episodes and had an outline for seasons two and three. So very early in the process we knew where we were headed and therefore, what sort of capability the ship would need seasons down the track. First of all, the ship had to launch from Earth and head straight on its way, without any refueling or rendezvousing that would allow for a rescue. Most interplanetary spacecraft in fi lm and TV are large ships built in orbit that aren't constrained by the weight and scale issues of a planetary launch —think the Hermes from The Martian. The Odyssey spaceship had to be more like SpaceX's Starship, A. THE VERY FIRST SKETCH OF THE ODYSSEY HASHED OUT ON A NAPKIN WHILE AT LUNCH WITH DEAN ISRAELITE. B. SECTION DRAWN TO SHOW THE WRITERS THE SHIP LAYOUT, TO ENSURE THE SCRIPTS WORKED WITHIN THE SETS. A B