Meeting the ship

Daly brings new employee Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) onto the spaceship as a fresh crew member. Her shocking realization that she is now aboard this strange environment is revealed in a pullback from her at the window of the USS Callister as it flies through space. Ship designs began with Art Director Joel Collins at Painting Practice, and then were brought into Framestore to deliver as a hi-res CG model. “Rob Harrington, our head of CG, slavishly went through turning that into a model that worked in the round and worked three-dimensionally,” says Dodgson. “He really made sure that all the lines of that ship worked beautifully, and all the scales worked, and whatever angle you looked at it from, it all complemented each other.”

To film that pullback, Milioti was shot on a corridor set-piece behind a layer of glass. A dolly pulled back as far as possible, after which Framestore took over digitally. “One of the interesting things that came up with that shot is because it’s an HDR delivery,” says Dodgson, “we realized that the old kind of method of blowing out all the windows inside the space ship wouldn’t work, so actually we had to model and project and build interiors for all of the corridors, because as soon as you see that in an HDR delivery you see everything inside.”