DESIGNING
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER JULIAN MURPHY TALKS ABOUT CREATING NEW FACTION THE TIME BREAK INITIATIVE’S UNDERGROUND BASE FOR SERIES TWO
CONCEIVING THE TBI
We had to create a time machine, and in one way that’s a very exciting thing; in another, it’s quite a scary thing because there’ve been some less than successful time machines in the past. The idea we focused on was the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. So we thought of an underground tunnel which is incredibly long and allows objects to reach very high velocities. Joe [Barton, writer] had always set it in the Alps, and we liked the idea that it was in a vast cavern beneath the mountain.
Interestingly there is, in Texas, an abandoned collider [the Superconducting Super Collider], the beginning of which was built. They spent a lot of money on it, and didn’t finish it – it’s still there, still abandoned. The pictures from that were very inspirational, because they are extraordinary – the scale of it is amazing. I remember when we found it, Carl [Tibbetts, director] being really excited and saying, “That’s what it looks like.” So our TIme Break Initiative building was modelled on a lot of the pictures from that abandoned collider in America.
THE INTERIOR SETS
Basically, it was three sets – two of which were heavily greenscreen. There was an interior, largely built, which was the lab complex where the scientists worked. That was built as a concrete-effect set in the conventional way. Then there was the huge cavern where the cylinders were loaded and operated from. That was a 90% greenscreen set – a green box with some real elements like the platform and the control room built, everything else green. Then there was the tunnel which the capsule races along – that was again a 90% greenscreen set. We’ve learned over the years that there’s nothing easier to VFX than a tunnel, so we never build them!
SURFACE ENTRANCE
With the exteriors, most of it was shot in the Alps – where Dr Samson’s house was, and all his journeys to and from it. But the actual Time Break Initiative was an old quarry in Wales, up in Trefil, with the Alps put in around it, and a series of concrete blocks added. They’re real buildings, but moved by CGI and doctored. Those buildings are in a different part, very nearby. And they’re not the same, so you wouldn’t quite recognise them.
TUNNEL TEXTURES
