PRODUCTION DESIGN AND SET DECORATION: SEASON TWO
As a longtime fan of the Outlander novels, Jon Gary Steele knew what was coming in season two and says he and Terry Dresbach were very excited about the prospect of production designing and costuming the opulence of eighteenth-century Paris described in Dragonfly in Amber.
“We both love Paris. I mean, who doesn’t?” Steele laughs. “The eighteenth century is one of the most elegant periods of art, architecture, fashion…everything! We started prepping [season two] before we finished season one. We were building models and Terry was doing sketches for costumes, then showing it to Ron to get a jump, because we knew it was going to be so big.
“In Glasgow Cathedral, they had these speakers and little spotlights hanging at the top of these columns that we weren’t allowed to remove. We had to make all of these little rubber roses and things that looked like parts of the architecture that you could stick over the speakers.”
“We tried to show the meticulous attention to detail in the architecture of Paris salons, private homes, shops, and brothels as a direct contrast to season one Scotland. Myself, set decorator Gina Cromwell, assistant set decorator Stuart Bryce, supervising art director Nicki McCallum, and the whole art department researched eighteenth-century Paris to get the details right and to make it correct architecturally, as well as show what a decadent and sexy period it was.”
In the first half of the season, the Fraser apartment and Versailles were the focal-point sets built on the soundstages. Building on the lessons they learned from season one, Steele says, “I wanted to have hallways surrounding the larger rooms, to give more depth and allow the directors and DPs the room to dolly the camera from hallways through large openings to the interiors.”
“There were so many corridors that we needed fifteen console tables,” prop buyer Sue Graham says of the palace apartment. “We actually bought reproductions and had them altered and mended and gilded and painted to make them look correct for the period.”
Gina Cromwell says every room was packed with detail work that added richness to every frame. “We had a full-time—sometimes two—tradesman working with us to do all of the upholstery and drapeage. We made all of the door furniture, like the handles on the doors and the windows. The cast-iron interiors of the fireplaces, which go all the way around, we had those made.” Steele adds, “We had over two hundred fifty linear feet of tapestries printed to cover the hallways and give them a golden glow.”
“The Culloden Visitor Centre was actually a brilliant set to do. We were making a museum that was of its time and it’s everything I’ve always hated about museums. There wouldn’t have been many people beating a path to go there. It was quite funny, just the way we could arrange the weapons in a way that’s not even interesting or dynamic.”
The dinner party in “La Dame Blanche” was another high point for the design team, with a myriad of details audiences won’t register at first glance. Cromwell reveals that the wineglasses and the cutlery on the table were specially made for the episode. “We did it because acquiring three-pronged forks, which would be more appropriate for that period—we just couldn’t get enough of them. We could get two, but we knew there [were] going to be somewhere around eighteen people dining.” Graham adds, “It took an enormous amount of organization, but it was really satisfying to see [the finished set] at the end of the day.”
Cromwell’s favorite Parisian set was Master Raymond’s apothecary. “There’s a lot going on there,” she reveals. “We had all of the apothecary pots made for us because of the quantities that we needed to go all the way around the room. The back room was incredible—we had something like a hundred forty skulls. I started to put them in and we made these alcoves for them, because in the book it says it’s like a honeycomb of shelves, so they put the skulls in them. Some of them were tiny little bird skulls, but it looked great when it was done. Lydia [Farrell], one of our assistants, is an artist by training, and she did some fantastic drawings that were slightly Egyptian and all over the walls. We were trying to give the impression of Master Raymond having wider experience of life and possibly time travel.”
For Steele, two sets in particular topped his expectations. First was the blue daybed that served as the setting for Claire and Jamie’s intimate rendezvous in “La Dame Blanche.” Steele explains that it has “blue-mirrored squares amongst different silks and gold leaf. The back of this daybed opens, and the doors are mirrored on one side and silk on the other as they slide into pockets. It was designed so that when Claire’s having all these parties, she can be sitting here looking back at all of the guests milling around.”
“In March, we started planting potatoes around the back [of Lallybroch], where we have greensmen that work. We [planted] in batches, because we were never quite sure when we were going to start filming ‘The Fox’s Lair.’ They ended up filming it in November, and all the plants had died. We managed to get a load of tomato plants, which do look a little bit like potatoes. It’s very frustrating when you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to try and actually get potato plants to grow. In the end, Claire, our production coordinator, got on the phone and through sheer luck found a scientist who had been doing some work on some potatoes in a greenhouse and hadn’t got round to chucking them out. We sent a truck up and came back with a load of potato plants, right at the eleventh hour.”
Another highlight for Steele is King Louis XV of France’s hidden chamber. “The Star Chamber was actually the first dome I ever built,” Steele says. “The plaster man cast it, then we pierced it with holes for stars. Then there was a snake crawling on the ground underneath it, and Claire walks through in this giant dress. It is really stunning stuff.”
For the return to Scotland and the last half of the season, Cromwell says, the decoration got more military-oriented. “We had cannons to make and massive amounts of campsite stuff,” she details. “There were about seventy tents we ended up making [for the battles], and of course they would CGI more. Flags also came into play, because we’re going to war.”
Late in the season, “Dragonfly in Amber” gave the entire team one more major challenge: an entirely new look called for by the shift to 1968. “I watched a load of sixties movies and got a load of sixties books and magazines from the period,” Cromwell says. “You’re not looking at that trendy look that people reproduce now as the sixties, but we had to go back to looking at 1968 Ideal Home magazine. You get more of a feel for the [era] rather than what people cherry-pick from the period and use now. What’s so interesting about 1968 is that it’s actually really quite modern.”
