Transcript

(dramatic thud)

♫ All around me are familiar faces

♫ Worn out places

♫ Worn out places

Hi I'm Mike Seymour for FXGuide dot com, for Wired.

For the Amazon Studios, 'The Man in the High Castle,'

Zoic Studios provided the visual effects work

to recreate the period drama set in this alternate universe.

The set extensions and environment work was extensive,

but for a host of unusual reasons.

Firstly, the show was set in America,

but shot in Canada, with the story mainly playing out

in New York, San Francisco, and the mountainous Canon City.

Secondly, it was set in 1962, which means removing

many of the traces of modern day life.

But, it's an America that lost World War II,

an America divided by two global superpowers

of the show, Germany and Japan.

And finally, if that wasn't hard enough as it was,

for fairly obvious reasons, many locations

that were scouted for the show,

simply didn't want to have their offices or buildings

covered in Nazi swastikas.

Similarly, some of the Canadian Chinese communities

didn't want to embrace the Imperial Japanese look

from the production's art department.

In fact, the more the production got into it,

the more key visual effects became.

Even some simple problems, such as

finding period cars, or planes, or trains,

needed to be rethought as 1960s cars

would not have actually developed

and been designed to look the way they did,

had America lost Washington to an A-bomb

and never had a post-war boom, instead,

suffering occupation and defeat.

The amount of hidden visual effects

in episodic television is growing dramatically,

as companies such as Zoic,

allow stories as twisted as The Man in the High Castle

to be realized on an episodic budget,

and allow us to see the world of author Philip K. Dick

from someone as talented and as amazing

as executive producer Ridley Scott.

The show has been a hit for Amazon,

who have already commissioned a second series for 2016.

Well please subscribe for more behind the scenes action,

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

♫ Stop children what's that sound

[Juliana] ♫ Stop children I need answers.

♫ what's that sound

And I'm not leaving until I get them.

♫ Stop children, stop stop stop

What if there's a way out, for you, for me, for everyone?

♫ Stop