Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521244
6 0 P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 2 4 scenes, including the Greater Khingan Mountains work camp, camp area and Mike Evans' hut were built with extensive help from the greens team during the extreme cold and rain of an English winter in a forest outside of Guildford, southwest of London. The main control room of Red Coast Base was a joy to design and build from beginning to end. When Ye Wenjie finds herself here in 1967, she stands in a room filled with instruments and equipment: signal lights, oscilloscope displays and control panels with operators in military uniforms. At first, she thinks they are involved with bombs, but later learns the true purpose was to establish contact with an extra- terrestrial civilisation. Like all members of the Art Department, I love a good bit of research and some tech to go with it. Having sourced the majority of the instruments used on the machines in Eastern Europe, designing how they would all work together was a much larger challenge, as was the look of the room itself. Again, I lent heavily on Chapman to make sure we were not Westernizing the aesthetic. It was vitally important that the space not feel like a facsimile of Communist China, but create a feeling for Ye Wenjie's experience that was far more visceral. Again, the graphics department worked entirely in Mandarin and with the help from one of our consultants, Dr. Matthew Kenzie, a particle physicist, they designed the diagram of how the sun was to magnify the message from the telescope so as to be understood by even the least scientific amongst us. The most contentious moment in the making of the whole show surrounded the input device that Ye Wenjie would use to reply to the message from the aliens. None of us knew what existed at the time for a language with tens of thousands of characters. In a distant corner of the internet, I found a blurry image of an American version which attempted to nominate keys for different strokes and build the characters that way. This was considered laughable by our Chinese designers and director. After much debate and an impassioned plea by Derek, it was decided we would use a number system and a companion book of characters. Ye Wenjie would frantically flip A B A. CULTURAL REVOLUTION STRUGGLE SESSION. SHOT IN THE BACKLOT OF SHEPPERTON STUDIOS WITH 300 EXTRAS AND LATER EXTENDED BY VFX. PRODUCTION STILL. B. STRUGGLE SESSION SIGNS IN PROGRESS. GRAPHIC DESIGNERS FLORENCE TASKER AND ADIO FOK TALKING WITH THE ARTIST/CALLIGRAPHER RUIJUN HU. C. RED COAST BASE CONTROL ROOM. CONCEPT ART BY RYAN DE SILVA. D. RED COAST BASE CONTROL ROOM BEING SHOT BY CINEMATOGRAPHER JONATHAN FREEMAN. SET PHOTO. E. RED COAST BASE CONTROL ROOM, BUILT ON K STAGE AT SHEPPERTON STUDIOS. SET PHOTO. F. CONTROL ROOM LAYOUT. CREATED IN RHINO BY ART DIRECTOR CHAPMAN KAN. THIS LATER BECAME THE TOP PAGE OF THE CONTROL ROOM 'USER GUIDE."