Principal photography has been taking place at Wolf Studios in Wales. “Joel and his team’s work have been outstanding,” remarks Dodgson. “They made a full-size bear palace that was all finished and absolutely incredible. There are interior sets that look like they’re 200 years old from Oxford. There was a town built in a quarry for Trollesund, which we then extended. We did quite a lot in Oxford which was augmented to become the parallel world version. There was some work in London including aerial shoots. We also shot outside in Wales, but we’re changing so much of that. I spent a week doing helicopter shoots in Iceland to give us the material to turn Wales into the North. We have scenes with Lin-Manuel Miranda in a balloon where there are entire CG cloudscapes, as well as adding a lot of boats in for the Gyptians, building the exterior of the bear palace, and for the Far North, extending mountain tops constructed on stages and the entire world around them along with the Northern Lights and weather.”

There is a prevailing steampunk aesthetic that features airships rather than planes and submarines instead of boats. “It’s a parallel world that is set in the same time as ours, except that the industrial revolution never happened and the microchip wasn’t invented,” explains Whitlam. “A lot of what Philip Pullman has done in the books is to tap into the interconnectivity of everything.”

The shared shot count was not high between Framestore London and Montreal. “Predominantly episodes one to three are London and episodes four to eight are Montreal,” reveals Whitlam. “Montreal did the majority of the North work and polar bears, while London owned the Golden Monkey and Pan.” The only shared shots involve the daemon belonging to Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) called Stelmaria, which takes the form of a snow leopard as well as the Golden Monkey and Pan. “We cast groups of animators to do animals.” Turnover of shots for Season 1 started in November of 2018 and finished in October of 2019. Adds Whitlam, “There are around 200 to 300 visual effects shots per episode.”

Another difficulty has been ensuring that the performances of the daemons are nuanced. “We have to make sure that we are doing the actors justice when putting a CG character next to them,” observes Dodgson. “Looking forward into the future, it’s maintaining the benchmark of creature work across multiple seasons of a show. I’m excited for people to see how the daemons compliment the performances.”