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Carey Meyer - Interviewed at the Buffy soundstage August 23rd 2001
Joining Buffy
How did you start working on Buffy?
I was hired as the art director for season one, and I worked for Steve Hardy, who鈥檚 from England. He鈥檚 a very good friend of mine and I loved working with him.
He was not planning on coming back, and [Buffy line producer] Gareth Davies asked me if I wanted to do the show, starting with the second season. I said, "Of course, I鈥檇 love to, it鈥檚 a great opportunity for me". So that鈥檚 how I got the job.
Film style sets
What do you have to take into consideration when you design a set?
We鈥檙e a one camera show as opposed to a three camera show, so we film a set from any angle. So the considerations are very much like a feature film with a false set.
You try to make it come apart as much as possible so that you can get any sort of film camera angle that you want, and also [it has to] be big enough that you can get into [it] and film and have lots of action and stuff like that.
Factory Fresh
What inspired the factory set in the second season?
I saw a photograph of a Rennie MacIntosh building from England, of an old library [with] a really interesting inside. It was very rectangular, very hard-edged, and had a great chandelier hanging in the centre.
I keyed off that photograph, created an illustration of the factory set and showed it to Joss. That鈥檚 actually what got me the job, that illustration. It was all black and white and was very dark and hard-edged. It related very much to a photograph of the Rennie MacIntosh library.
Meyer, how you've grown
Have the Sunnydale high street sets expanded a lot over time?
We started very small. It used to just be the parking lot on the back side of our stage.
The only thing here before I started was a palm tree. Joss had always talked about having a little backyard or a Sunnydale main street [so] I keyed off the Edward Hopper painting of the diner and did an illustration of [the Expresso Pump] that looked very much like the Edward Hopper painting.
We created this as a little set that had some views out and created little pieces of backings so that we could shoot inside here, looking out at what would one day become our back lot.
Then from there through season three, we just kept adding little facades and plugging up little spaces until we [ended up with] this whole little street back here. But it took a full season for that to take place.
Designing Sunnydale high street
Did you have the final word about what shops would go into the set?
No, it just sort of came together. Sometimes we would need a particular façade that we would make specifically for that show and just plop in. I was really more geared towards trying to get a full 360 degree area that we could shoot.
Since then we have taken facades and altered them slightly to make them one thing or another, like the Magic Box exterior. That did used to be a little magic shop before it became the Magic Box - which Giles took over in season five. Then we changed the façade, created the interior on stage and now a fully-fledged exterior out here as well.
College creation
Did it take a lot of work and research to recreate UCLA in its form as the Sunnydale campus?
Well, I keyed off of the library building at UCLA for that interior, and took photographs of a lot of the tile work in there and replicated it here on the set.
There鈥檚 no actual layout [at UCLA] that鈥檚 the same, but stylistically we tried to key into that as much as possible. It鈥檚 a beautiful structure so we wanted to use that.
Snake Bytes
Does your production design extend into CGI?
Well, we haven鈥檛 done too many fully-fledged CGI sets, but we do a lot of CGI interaction with sets.
Typically, it relates to a character in the show, like a large snake or some other character who might be CGI. They do react with the sets a lot, like the way the snake came down the old high school hallway [in Graduation Day Part 2] was so huge, it was crashing [through] large portions of the set.
So I storyboarded that whole sequence based on Joss鈥檚 description of the scene, and we then created four breakaway live action pieces of the set. It was all staged and choreographed to interact with the CGI snake.
In that sense I try to incorporate myself into the effects very much. In terms of the CGI sets or the characters, I鈥檓 not a CGI person.
Season five triumphs
What are the things you were most proud of in season five?
Definitely the magic shop interior. I really felt that was a successful set. It feels small and safe, but it still is a very shootable set, it鈥檚 got lots of depth, lots of length and we鈥檙e able to have the back room attached to it so there鈥檚 lots of different areas to go in that set. So I thought that was probably the best set from season five.
[As for] Glory鈥檚 apartment, I wasn鈥檛 as proud of it as the Magic Box.
Hidden bases and secret labs
The Initiative sets from season four were particularly impressive. Tell us about designing them.
We did the huge exterior up at the Lockheed complex. It had a very large stage with a huge pit in it and we lined the interior of the pit with Mylar, and made it look sort of space age. That was supposed to be a huge underground facility where the Initiative were based.
Another set I was very proud of that was part of that complex was a secret laboratory off of the Initiative base, sort of an underground bunker where Adam the robot took all his operations into.
That set was actually created out of an old church set that we had. The church had these Gothic arches in it that I continued around and made look like the inside of an engine or something.
It was all concrete and had a very large lighting apparatus that went down through the whole centre so it was a really interesting and very visual set and we were able to create it quickly for one episode.
Filming in a firefight
Were there any safety problems with shooting firefights on the main Initiative set.
That was very easy. It鈥檚 such a large space and you鈥檙e creating a lot of depth using longer lenses and stacking up a lot of action.
So you鈥檝e got large explosions happening in the background, but in reality it鈥檚 quite far away from any actors - so in a space like that it鈥檚 actually very safe.
Obviously it looks really tremendous on screen, but it鈥檚 actually just some propane mortars going off in the background and it鈥檚 relatively safe.
Car park cemetery
Where are all the cemetery scenes filmed?
[Points] That鈥檚 our cemetery set and you鈥檒l notice the large green areas - that all used to be parking lot. We poured in kerb, back-filled it with dirt and planted grass and lots of trees and stuff and that鈥檚 our graveyard set.
We shoot a lot of the graveyard stuff there. We do go to another cemetery for much wider shots, but the majority of our cemetery stuff actually takes place in that little tiny parking lot. At night, with a couple of headstones in the background with all the trees and such, you can really cheat to make it look quite large.
We bring out fake grass and put it on the tarmac and fill it all in, but it鈥檚 just a little tiny parking lot.