Interview with Caprica location scouts

L.A. Times talked to Anand Kanna and Scott Firth, who are location scouts for the show. You can read the article here.

Grand designs: Caprica City is fictional, but it was largely designed by a real Vancouver architect. "Arthur Erickson buildings totally suit the style of the show," Firth said. "He's one of our favorite Vancouver architects, and you'll see quite a few of his buildings in 'Caprica.' He did some buildings at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Public Library. They're quite striking. They're really sexy buildings."

Neighborhood watch: "We used different parts of the city for different challenges," Kanna explained. "In Vancouver, there's an area called Coal Harbour, which is very modern. That was perfect for establishing Caprica City itself, the steel and glass look of downtown Caprica and its really modern-looking buildings." Added Firth, "And then there's another area of town in the series, and it's called Little Tauron, which is a little bit backwards. It's more of the run-down, '40s feel. So we would go to Chinatown for that."

City limits: At any given time, parts of Vancouver appear on a municipal "hot list," published quarterly. "We usually get a list from the city of locations where it's dicey to move into," Kanna said. "It's a list of sensitive areas that have had a lot of filming, and it's to give everybody a bit of a rest from having a film crew in their neighborhood. And a lot of the stuff on the hot list is construction -- not to film on a road that has a big pit on it with no water main in there. So the hot list is there just as a guideline, but the city works with us, and everything ends up working out fine in the end."

Place holders: Since the "Caprica" writers cast their imaginations far beyond Vancouver's brick-and-mortar reality, the location scouts follow suit. "You have to be pretty creative in a lot of ways," Firth said. "The farthest we've been away is about 50 kilometers from the studio, and it was a 40,000-square-foot mansion on a farm. But it was scripted as something else. A location doesn't have to be exactly what's in the script, as long as you can make it look like what you need, whether you have to augment it with some set decoration or a sign.

Interview with Caprica designer Richard Hudolin

Den of Geek has a new interview with BSG & Caprica production designer Richard Hudolin, whose credits also include Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Dead Like Me and Reaper.

He talked about his work on Caprica among other things:

Was it refreshing to have a slightly cleaner slate for Caprica in terms of design?

Well, I shot the pilot while I was finishing off Battlestar, last season. It's fifty-eight years before the Cylon war, so we're kind of re-inventing what Caprica was. It's a lot of fun and a great challenge. Dealing with Ron Moore and David Eick and the writers, we can actually get on the phone and say 'What do you think it should be?' [laughs]. And we come up with all these different ideas...we try and actually bring some of the Battlestar feeling into some of the designs in a subtle way, because by the time you get to fifty-eight years later, these are things that would have evolved. It's kind of like you're retro-fitting something, but you have to make the sense and the logic work for stuff that's going to happen sixty years from now. So it's a real little mind-twist to get some of the stuff right. But if you've seen the pilot, I thought everybody did a really great job on that.

Do you think you'll be sticking with sci-fi? You seem to be doing a lot of it now...

[laughs] Here's the story: I did Doctor Who, which I didn't know was sci-fi - to me it was just a great show to work on. And I had done a whole lot of other shows that weren't science-fiction. Lot of film work, drama, comedy, musical and so on. So I did the pilot for Stargate, and that was a huge success, and then I did five seasons of it. Then I said to myself that I had to get out of here in case people started saying 'All you do is sci-fi'!.

So after I left Stargate I made a big point of taking shows only like drama. comedy, western, whatever...anything but sci-fi. So I then did the pilot for Haunted with Michael Rymer, and that got picked up and shot in LA. Then that went by the wayside, and while I was working on something else, Michael Rymer rang me inviting me down to meet David Eick. When he told me had Battlestar Galactica going, I went 'Oh shit!' [laughs].

And then I said to myself that if I don't take this, it's not going to come around for another forty years, and at that point I probably won't be able to do anything [laughs]. So I took it, and that went for five seasons, and between seasons I would do other things like Painkiller Chain and Eureka, and that evolved into Caprica. It's just one evolvement after another that keeps me in this world right now, but it's nothing that I actually planned.

Caprica gets a showrunner: Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson, writer and co-executive producer on Battlestar Galactica, will be taking on the same duties on Caprica and eventually take over as showrunner, writes Chicago Tribune. When the writers meet in February to work on the first season, Ron Moore will be still be at the helm. Espenson is expected to take over halfway through the season.

Other Galactica veterans who have joined the new crew are composer Bear McCreary, production designer Richard Hudolin and special effects supervisor Gary Hutzel. Espenson says that BSG writers Michael Taylor and Ryan Mottesheard will also soon be joining them in the writers' room.

Espenson has a long list of television credits which include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, The Inside, Tru Calling, Dollhouse and Warehouse 13. She came on board Galactica for the third season and has since also written the recent BSG webisodes, The Face of the Enemy, and the upcoming movie, The Plan.

Asked about the differences between Caprica and Battlestar, she said: "I think it will certainly be different, but it's like a different garment made from the same fabric. The beating heart of it will be the same -- complex moral situations, high stakes, compelling characters. Robots."

And speaking of robots, Gary Hutzel, the new visual effects supervisor, told LA Times what we can expect to see on Caprica:

Moving from "Battlestar" to "Caprica," is the process easier for you?

Because we've been doing the robot centurions for years it's ... well, "Caprica's" more robot-heavy for us. There's a lot more development of the Cylon robots. We also have a lot of environmental stuff to do.

Some of the things are similar in that there's still the element of terrorism taking place. "Caprica" is much more on the nose, much more literal when it comes to talking about those things....

The worlds in effect are allegories for the countries and they're very clear-cut.... "Caprica" is the jewel of the planets. "Caprica" is the United States.

Caprica starts shooting in July for an early 2010 premiere.