In this episode, we learn how a little Canadian town was transformed into the show’s bustling backdrops. From negotiations with farmers and shop owners to creating spaces for the show’s more eccentric characters, we’ll hear from the crew about how they created the world of Umbrella.
In this episode, we learn how a little Canadian town was transformed into the show’s bustling backdrops. From negotiations with farmers and shop owners to creating spaces for the show’s more eccentric characters, we’ll hear from the crew about how they created the world of Umbrella.
Emmy: I heard a rumor… that you watched all the new episodes of The Umbrella Academy before listening to this podcast. Otherwise, things will be spoiled.
Just a few scenes into the third episode of Umbrella Academy season 2, we see Vanya driving alone down a dark country road. It’s pitch black, no street lamps. But up ahead she notices the headlights of a stalled out milk truck. In the darkness she can just make out a milkman with white blonde hair standing in front of his truck. And that’s when the shooting starts, because this isn’t a milkman. It's one of the Swedish assassins who have been tracking down the Academy.
Panicked, Vanya drives off and swerves into a ditch. She runs into a cornfield with the Swedes right behind her. The corn is tall, a head above all of them, and it’s thick. She winds her way through the rows, trying to hide.
There’s a lot to pay attention to in this scene, but perhaps the most impressive thing is something you’ve haven’t even thought about: the corn. Like the costumes and the music, this cornfield was created just for the world of the Umbrella Academy.
Chris: My name is Chris Burkholder, I’m basically a farmer, and that’s what I do for a living. I work with my father, my brother, two of my sons.
Chris Burkholder is the man responsible for the cornfield. He has a few farms just outside of Toronto.
Chris: We grow corn and soybeans and wheat and then we host agricultural location filming.
You might think that something like a corn field chase would be shot inside, on a sound stage or with a greenscreen. But it turns out, when you want to run through corn, you gotta start from scratch. But for the Umbrella Academy it couldn’t just be any cornfield—the location manager Andrew O’Sullivan had a few very specific requests-
Chris: He told me kind of what they were looking for a little bit. They were looking for a sunset opportunity over the one hill. And that perhaps they were going to be thinking about some crop circles
So they start planting. It’s about an acre, or around 34 thousand stalks. When the corn started to grow, no one on the Umbrella Academy team believed that it would be tall enough by the time it came to shoot.
Chris: The corn was maybe literally ankle high like it was very, very short right at this point.
But Chris is an expert, and he knows his crop well.
Chris: It goes from that to pretty much 12, 13 feet tall. Like, that's how quickly it grows.
Good thing, too….because just over a month later, lights were up and the cameras were rolling. And in what had just a few months earlier been an empty field, Vanya was now running away from Swedish assassins and blasting them away with her powers, leaving behind a crop circle for Five to find.
Five (clip): Good to see your powers are still intact. Let’s go.
This is Behind The Scenes: The Umbrella Academy, Season 2. I’m your host Brandon Jenkins.
And on today’s episode we’re taking a look at how to make a place feel very, very real for TV. We’re going to meet the set designers, art directors, and location managers who took a small town in Canada and turned it into a replica of 1960s Dallas, Texas. Then we’ll take you inside one of those buildings to show you how the sets can help tell the story of a character.
When the crew of Umbrella Academy sat down almost two years ago to start planning their second season, they knew they would need to essentially take over an entire town to bring their vision to life. There are two main parties in any location negotiation. First, there’s the town itself.
Kim: Hamilton really historically was a bit of a manufacturing town. It was known as a steel town, that was the major industry. And, you know, over time, as manufacturing has sort of gone away, it's it's really become a very diverse economy.
Kim Adrovez lives in Hamilton, Ontario, about an hour south of Toronto. She’s a senior project manager on the Hamilton Film commission --- the group that helps bring TV and Film productions to town.
Kim: Our role is always just to facilitate. So get the conversations going. Get the right people at the table. Advocate for the production to get those permissions in place.
On the other side of the table is the Umbrella Academy locations team.
Malcolm: So my name is Malcolm McCulloch, I’m a long-term location manager in Toronto, Ontario and this is now my second season on Umbrella Academy.
For the Umbrella crew, Hamilton had a lot going for it. It’s industrial vibe is actually pretty similar to Dallas’s from decades ago. And for the folks in Hamilton… bringing in a production the size of Umbrella Academy can come with all sorts of benefits.
Kim: It's fun to play “spot the Hamilton location” it really develops... there helps reinforce a sense of pride within the community. But then there's really tangible, concrete ways as well that it helps. So money obviously.
But it’s not all upside. There are real issues the town has to consider.
Kim: Their concern is just with losing parking, losing foot traffic, being able to to do the business that they normally do.
Heading into production for this season, Malcolm needed to secure at least two city blocks. So what we see as Dallas in Umbrella is actually Ottawa Street in Downtown Hamilton.
Malcolm: I always think of locations as like, you have 30 seconds to gain someone's trust. If I'm at someone's storefront or at the residence, it's like there's someone at your door and you have to convince them that you can work together.
Malcolm is responsible for all the negotiations, when it comes to using locals’ homes, offices and municipal areas for filming.
Malcolm: But leading into the first visit, it was probably the most stressful time of my life. I think I aged rapidly in those two or three weeks leading up to uh what was going to be Ottawa Street. And then there was this alleyway, which became my hardest negotiation, which was only an alleyway. The owner was trying to get uh some kind of restaurant in there. We'd have these dramatic negotiations at the very beginning because if we didn't get that place, we couldn’t make our movie.
That alley became Arrival Alley, the spot where each sibling lands once they get dumped out of time. It’s the family meeting spot, a major set piece and an important get for the show. But Malcolm didn’t secure these places alone. For Ottawa Street, he enlisted some help.
Malcolm Coralie Not. She worked on Ottawa Street from the middle of February until the end of November. And her role was just to be with those people all the time.
Coralie My job is, it’s a hand holder. I'm a therapist. I have to walk people through things that they probably could never imagine.
This is Coralie. And as the on-the-ground representative of the locations team, she was responsible for getting spaces ready for filming and keeping the business owners happy … especially when she had weird production requests. Take for example, the store that became the butcher shop….
Coralie: We had to put a giant cow on her roof. The butcher shop is Melanie Anderson and her store is actually Painted Bench. I had to call her landlord and say, hey, you know, we’re doing a show. Is it OK if we put a cow on your roof a couple times a month. How's that sound?
You can get a good glimpse of that cow about ten minutes into episode one, when Five blinks onto the roof of the butcher shop. And while a cow on a roof seems like a strange ask, it’s just one in a long list of changes the team had to make.
Coralie: There was a gallery that we turned into a supermarket with you know bananas for 19 cents. There was a sewing store. There's a little Italian restaurant. There was another restaurant. So many restaurants
That signage could be confusing. Customers would sometimes come into a store to get the listed sale, only to find out it was a set piece with the 1960s price.
Getting the street period ready was no easy task.
Malcolm: It's like it's something that I get a rush out of, actually, like. It just became this Rubik's Cube, Jenga, whatever kind of like it became this thing where every time we got something, it would just turn into something else that would turn into like, oh, well, now we need to get on the roof. Oh, now we need to add this whole wall. And it wasn't the demands of our art department. It was the demands of the period. It was like, you have to make everything look the same. So it was like, take all those signs.
Kim: Because they were trying to have it set in the 60s and match certain looks. We were able to do some creative work, like working with the art department to reproduce meter heads so that there was continuity between the studio look and the look on the street. Or working with our street lighting team to be able to flick street lights on and off so that the modern LED lights weren't going to be in the shot.
Coralie: And I think because our show was so big and the dressing right down to the background performers, the cars, you know, people would just stand on the street in complete awe. It was something so different, like a period piece and right down to the details of even having the hydrants painted to the exact colors of what a hydrant would look like in the 60s.
Turns out that red fire hydrants haven’t always been the norm. Hydrants in the 60s were painted green and silver.
Coralie: So I had to send an email to the water department every time we were there to tell them that we're painting it because the hydrants are color coded. So if there is a fire, the fire department knows what the pressure is that comes out of the hydrants and what hoses they need to use. So that was also a safety concern as well. So I had to liaise with the water department all the time. And they were super helpful and and really, really made my life easy up there. While we were shooting and at the end of the night, we'd have to paint it back to the Hamilton colors.
In order to transform a town over like this, there are so many moving parts. It’s like the circus coming to town. And while they’re altering the location, it can be hard to imagine the place as anything but a set. But Jeff King, an executive producer on the show, remembers the moment when that final detail came into place, and it all became very real.
Jeff: Two or three days before shooting, when the art department had finished putting up all the facades on the street. And the vehicle team had put all the picture cars on the street. And all of a sudden after that, the residents of Hamilton started to drift up and they all started to take pictures of themselves with the cars. And the cars were like they were almost bigger stars than the actors at that point, And the next thing that happened was we started to have a few people come on to that street who were dressed in clothing from the 50s and 60s, and all of a sudden the transformation really became complete. And at that moment, I think we looked at each other and said, wow, this is going to work.
Ultimately, the crew spent so much time in Hamilton over the course of the year, in some ways they became locals themselves.
Kim: The crew formed these incredible relationships. They knew everyone on the street by. By their first name. They would know their backstories. I mean, more so than me as someone living in Hamilton and Coralie, for example, you know, lives a few hundred miles away from Ottawa Street and still comes back there every every time she needs her hair done because of the relationship she formed with a hairdresser on the street.
Coralie: I would do my grocery shopping. I would eat out there. I was basically living in in Hamilton. So a lot of us became sort of part of the local community because we were there every day.
Malcolm: Hats off to Hamilton, I can never praise them enough
About 80% of this season was shot on location in and around Hamilton. Which is quite a feat. But let’s zoom in on a space that was built from scratch for the show, and explore what the set can tell us about the person who would live in that space.
Perhaps the most important set piece in Season 2 belongs to one of its new characters … Elliott the conspiracy theorist.
Elliot (clip): You from the Pentagon?
Five: Definitely not
Elliott: CIA? FBI? KGB?
Rob You know, it it's tempting to, reduce Eliot to sort of like, uh, to a nut job to, uh, to a dingbat. But, uh, no, I think he's, um. I think he's super fun.
This is writer Rob Askins.
Rob: His shop serves as a home base and a home away from home for the siblings as they as they enter this this new and very different timeline. Yeah, you think about the great superhero headquarters. Right. They just they serve that. I hate to say that, but they serve the function of the Friends’ coffeehouse. And so it’s great to have a headquarters. Where it’s like, you don’t, because the thing that you want. The thing that you want to think that you really want to see. Right. You really want to see your characters in the same place bickering about what just happened in the last episode. Right. You want to see them make jokes. You want to see them get angry at each other. And it's just it's more efficient if there's a place to be.
Natasha: The more we started to know about who Elliot was and what the space was used for, we realized it was like the ground base for the siblings to come to, which was very similar to the Academy in first year and the living room.
Natasha Peschlow is one of the Art Directors on the Umbrella Academy and it’s her job to take the writers’ script and bring it to life on a soundstage.
Natasha: And that was such a big, extravagant, very visual set. And we knew we had to do something to be on the same level as that, if not exceed it. So from the beginning, it was always had to be our big grand set. It was the eye candy piece.
Check out the scene in Episode One when Five first blinks into Elliot’s apartment. He pours himself a cup of coffee, makes himself at home, and takes a look around.
The living room is filled with electronic equipment like ham radios, and the walls are covered with UFO sightings, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles.
Five (clip): You ever heard of area 51? Roswell?
Elliot: Hot damn, I always knew we weren’t the only ones!
Natasha: He saw conspiracy everywhere. If you look on the wall, it's like they're plastered with everything from UFOs to government conspiracies to all these different things that he was looking into. There’s a lot of UFO stuff on the walls. And some of which are ones our art department actually created. Because a lot of the UFOs clearance conspiracy theorists don't really want to be known. So to find the source of those is kind of hard. So we actually had our guys throwing plates up in the air and taking photos of them and doing all these little things to try and get these UFO images out there.
But conspiracy is only one aspect of this apartment. If you pay attention, other parts of his story come to light.
Natasha When we design and build a set, we're telling a story. The sets sets the mood. Excuse the double words um for the scene. This was about showing who Eliot was, because in dialog, you don't you don't know who he is. He's just this guy that sees the kids pop up in an alley and is a little crazy and thinks they're aliens and but you don't have any backstory. Whereas with the set, it gives the character that it sets the mood. It tells the story. It creates a world in which these characters exist.
Elliot (clip): I’ve been tracking anomalies in the atmosphere. Just waiting.
Five: Waiting for what?
Elliot: For you. For all of you.
Production Designer Mark Steel collaborated with the writers to come up with the full backstory of the space. Originally it was Elliot’s father’s dental office. Which means that there had to be evidence of that backstory lying around. In Episode 4 of season 2, Luther and Elliott spend a whole scene getting high on nitrous oxide, courtesy of the leftover dental equipment.
Luther (clip): How’d you get all this stuff
Elliot: My dad was a dentist. He left this place in his will when he died
After Elliot inherits the building, he tries to turn the downstairs into an electronics shop, which meant the team had to search across the country for 1960s televisions. This is set decorator Jim Lambie.
Jim: That was a real hunt to get that many televisions in that kind of shape to be able to sell the idea of it being a TV shop. So that was a lot of work on the telephone and some Los Angeles stuff and a lot of New York stuff to get us there.
For Elliot’s apartment, Jim had his work cut out for him. He not only has to bring in the conspiracy aspect, the dental history, and the electronics store. He’s also got to represent the idea that someone lives in this space, someone who’s a recluse, a hermit. Someone who's in those rooms 24/7.
Jim It's not necessarily pieces so much as it is just sort of like creating a, a complete world where you would have no reason to leave, where you have everything at your fingertips. So that's sort of those of the sort of things we think about when we're kind of creating a space for a character like that.
I mean...sounds pretty familiar
Jim: We’re all Elliot. We’re Elliot now. Yeah.
Earlier this year, almost the entire industry of television production shut down. Any part of making TV that required multiple people being in the same room became a challenge in the wake of the global pandemic. Entire cities whose economies are built on making television and film came to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of people are out of work.
Among the parts of the industry most affected… now, and possibly forever… are locations.
This is Kim Adrovez again with the Hamilton film commission.
Kim: Obviously, right now nobody's filming. So we're thinking ahead to how business is going to look in the new reality, what they're potentially going to need from us. The great news for Ontario is that we've been, you know, relatively OK through this pandemic. So we're just sort of looking at what new spaces we can open up for film. How can we think like a location manager and try to make life easier by identifying film friendly businesses, parking, holding and prep areas, unique locations, talking to partners in the community who maybe aren't able to do business as normal right now and gauging their appetite to host film.
And while we hope that everything will go back to normal, that we’ll find a vaccine and figure out ways to be safe in groups again, it’s also a real possibility that things won’t ever be the way they were before. That the way we make television will forever change. And the way the world is built for the screen will depend much, much less on the physical world around us. It’s a worry for locations manager, Malcolm McCulloch
Malcolm: So, visual effects department. This is what I'm kind of scared of, I'm kind of feeling like through this whole world that we're living through right now, that’s um visual effects is starting to take over what locations is. This is what technology has become. And I feel like through what's happening right now is that locations are becoming more and more visual and less physical.
It’s a huge predicament. If you can build a place on a computer, for example a corn field, and keep people safer -- is that going to become the new normal of TV production? Or is there something lost when you can’t run through the rows and rows of crops that were grown just for the show? And what happens to the people who live and work in those places year-round, like farmer Chris Burkholder or Hamilton resident Kim Adrovez. Because in the end..it’s not just the places that make the experience special. But the people who help bring those places to life.
Next week, on Behind the Scenes, we take a look at the music of Umbrella Academy, how it's made, how it’s chosen, and how it’s used in the show.
Jeff Russo: Once the lockdown happened, I had to figure out how to record our our orchestra, which is is pretty big.
Steve Blackman: Crank the volume on the music. The music is a character. And they're like, no, no, it doesn't mix well I’m like, guys, turn it up
Jen Malone: On Spotify I have a playlist that's about like five hundred songs right now.
Gerard Way: And then I kind of heard this song in my head, kind of Velvet Underground-ish type song, maybe a little bit like Rolling Stones, too. And so when I went home, I started recording that song.
Behind The Scenes: The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Thanks for listening.