Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546033
6 2 P E R S P E C T I V E J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 6 An It set story wouldn't be complete without revisiting the sewer system under the town. This time, however, we got to enter it in a different location. The location team scouted all the tunnel entrances in Southern Ontario for something different and came across a Victorian-era drainage tunnel under a disused railway line about two hours from Toronto. From the cut stone style of this entrance, we were able to transition into our stage-built sewer system of the typical poured concrete sewers from the earlier films. Building more sewers on this project than both the previous iterations, it set the stage for the appearance of Pennywise in his familiar, underworld guise. Derry Air Force Base The new addition to the It story was the Derry Air Force Base, or DAFB. When I first read the treatment for the series, I was a little concerned about how to achieve this in Canada. I grew up in the border town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in the 1970s and just across the river in Michigan was a SAC B-52 bomber fleet at Kincheloe Air Base, which fascinated me as a kid. On the Canadian side, there were never any air bases built to the same scale in what was described and needed for our story, and there were certainly no B-52s available for rent. The production did, however, find a lot of what we needed at Camp Borden, north of Toronto. It used to be an air base, but now it is used for military training, and it still has some period hangars, barracks and buildings that could be made to look like the DAFB headquarters. We had limited access and really only exterior shooting available to us here. The crew built a portion of the exterior plane for the actors to disembark, and the rest was taken over by VFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk. Adding to his workload was the rest of the base, including the fleet of B-52s and KC-135 Stratotankers, built in our Rhino model by Art Director Peter Bohdal. We refurbished a dilapidated gate house and added our DAFB signage to create the entrance at the decommissioned Hearn generating plant, a favorite shooting location in Toronto for as long as I have been in the business. A. DAFB MAIN GATE, LOCATION BUILD AT THE FORMER HEARNE GENERATING STATION TORONTO, SET PHOTO. B. DAFB CONTROL ROOM SET BUILD ON STAGE, CINESPACE STUDIOS, SET PHOTO. C. DAFB HANGAR AT FORMER BOMBARDIER ASSEMBLY PLANT, SET PHOTO. D. PENNYWISE'S VARDO WAGON INTERIOR, CINESPACE STUDIOS, SET PHOTO. A C D B