We chat with Seth Reed, Production Designer for "The Expanse", about how he and his team built out the future worlds of Earth, space ships, and an Asteroid mining colony.

This past Monday, SyFy network released the first episode of The Expanse online, with the rest of the season airing in mid-December. It's an ambitious show--an adaptation of a popular novel series that's already on its fifth book. One of the reasons for the books' success is its realistic depiction of space travel 200 years from now. Given the conceit that mankind has invented a spacefaring technology that allows for regular travel between Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid belt, the story is about the relationships between the cultures that have formed on Mars and asteroid colonies, and their relationship with Earth. What happens when you have generations of humans living on a mining Asteroid, and Martians who are more invested in the development of their planet than the interests of Earth? Thoughtful world building makes for compelling science fiction.

The production values of the show are impressive as well, with the need to tell an intertwining story from three very different types of environments. I got on the phone with Seth Reed, the production designer of The Expanse, to learn a bit about how set and production design contributed to that world-building.

Thanks for chatting with us, Seth! To start things off, can you talk about the role of a production designer and what your responsibilities were in the production of The Expanse?

Seth Reed: As the production designer, my responsibilities included designing everything that was behind or around the actors. That included all of the set decoration, scenery that we built, all the colors and fabrics and textures--pretty much the world. The props were within my department--the propmakers were pretty independent, and always are, but it all happens through the production design department. We provided all the graphics and everything that appears on those props as well.

The show is set around three basic areas as we switch between the three main characters. There's Earth, Ceres Station, and outer space on board different ships. Can you talk about how you and your team built out the look of each of those locations?

Well for Earth, we haven't really seen much of it [in the first episode]. We saw Avasarala's place, her office, but not that much. You see a few visual effects shots, which I was involved in, for setting up the look of Earth [200 years from now]. Earth is a more crowded place, with tall buildings designed with soft and geometric edges--a lot of times with points or simple spires at the top.

We're also assuming that global warming has really happened and the sea levels have risen, so there are a couple of sea walls that have been placed over the years to push the ocean back a little bit.

Earth in our story is full of texture and a lot less linear and planned. It's grown organically, of course, and has this huge long history. We were always trying, at least in the few things we were setting up, to acknowledge that and show the history and layering of Earth. So buildings aren't cleaned away so much as built over and built around and on to. Of course there's a lot more stuff--it's 200 year in the future, so things have changed. But we don't want to make all the things [of the present] go away.

Which is a different type of history that Ceres Station has, as an asteroid mining colony.

Structurally, Ceres is different because it's spinning and people are inside it. So it's got something like a reverse gravity. We're working with centrifugal gravity, one of the three forms of gravity that we talk about a lot in the production. People are basically pressed against the outside surface, and they're standing in Ceres upside down. So that means if you go toward the center of Ceres, you're actually ascending, and as you do that, you feel less the effects of simulated gravity. Given that principle, we're saying that people would tend to live in the outer edges--the first third, we'll call it--in an ant hill fashion as they carve tunnels in the asteroid.

How does that geography affect the cultures represented on the show and the look of the station?

I'm trying to remember, but I think we said that altogether there's six million people on Ceres. It's not that gigantic, but at the same time it is striated and hierarchical as a mirror of the way things are on Earth. So at one point we see our heroes are in one of the upper levels of Ceres and it looks like Earth in terms of having all the amenities we have--we designed that to be as clean and bright as possible. Deeper down, we wanted you to feel the tunnels that get smaller and darker.

In building that out, how much was with set extensions and how much was built on stages?

We had a lot of soundstage space. We had 72,000 square feet, which would be somewhere between five and six stages at Warner Bros. We had a lot of stage space--big generous space that was just fabulous to work in. And we built about 150 feet of tunnels for Ceres station, which to me, is quite a lot. We built several space ships interiors too--a lot of stuff.

And then the spaceships are the last setting. The Canterbury is a big part of the first episode, and we see other ships that appear as well. How did you go about designing the look of the different ships, even ones that are only seen a few times?

Well, we just go for it every time. In terms of balancing our resources, we put everything we could into every one of the ships. Everything we possibly could put in, we did. But at the same time, because the Canterbury is featured in the first episode, we really really wanted to get the audience involved and immersed in that space. We really built a very big set. The Canterbury is actually a very huge set. You wouldn't know, because we wanted to make it feel crowded, with big huge beams coming through, and lots of control instruments. When you see the actors walking through the ship, and down the corridors--those corridors are actually there.

In terms of the set and prop building, some thing you fabricated from scratch, and some things looked pulled from the real world. Where do you source props from to make it look futuristic and believable?

The Expanse is a very realistic show. We tried everything we could to stay as true to the books but also as true to whatever we could figure out from our research. So we were trying very hard never to make too much of a leap. For example, they're flying in spaceships, but they're not standing in the spaceships the way you've seen in Star Trek or in Battlestar. That is, [on those shows] the ship's flying along, and the people are standing up in the spaceship. And it's as if they're standing on the surface of the Earth. Well that can't happen unless they've figured out some magical gravity and inertia dampening machine. Because when you're under thrust, you're pressed down into the floor, which is another way we're conveying artificial gravity--thrust gravity.

So ships in The Expanse are set up the way a Saturn V rocket is set up, where people are standing on levels and looking down at the rocket, oriented vertically. That's the way we've set up all of our spaceships. It's new, in terms of how we've portrayed space travel in science fiction. That's a more realistic depiction.

And you have magnetic boots!

Right, for when the ships stop moving.

So for the hand props, and devices that people are using, how much research was done on how people would interact with those screens?

For their hand units, cellphones, or whatever you want to call them, we always run into this challenge. The visual effects team is going to help us out tremendously, but we had all of our little pieces had LEDs implanted in them for individual lighting. We in some cases had a practical display, where we had a piece of film in the device or laser etching into the acrylic to change the surfaces. But we also would superimpose a visual effects shot for any close ups.

Like Thomas Jane's character--Detective Miller's communicator is cracked. You see the wear on it.

Yeah, that was important, to get across that these devices had been used and worn.

We were looking for big concepts on this show. We were looking for how people understand that Earth was just one of the places that mankind can be, and how the forces of gravity and nature actually affect people in those other places. The fact that the characters travel most of the time not in Earth gravity at all--that it takes a long time to travel from planet to planet or planet to asteroid. We weren't trying to hide from that, and we tried to tell a story of how that affects people. The environments are woven into the story.

From a production design standpoint, we had design parameters to go off of. We did a tremendous amount of research and we used that research as carefully as possible to get somewhere and tell a story.

Thanks to Seth Reed to chatting with us about his work on The Expanse. The full first episode is on YouTube now, and the rest of the show will be on SyFy in December.