The Exhibition, being an animation, serves us a challenge: there are no existing sets or locations for us to use. We can’t find a soundstage, or dress our living rooms, or steal shots from around the city. But what the medium takeths away, it gives back with double strength.

The thinking behind the set design for The Exhibition was to take advantage of it being an animation. Storyhive is a competition of talented filmmakers doing talented filmmaking, and since we’re novices we needed to stand apart in every way we could. We needed spanning corridors that curve impossibly, explosions, infinitely reflective hallways, and other sets that are normally way out of reach for independent filmmakers. At the same time, the story moves briskly so the sets need to register quickly as plausible.

Obviously there was no real set-building involved, but in a certain sense you could say there was. Each scene needed its background sets built in a computer to an actual scale, using digital inches and digital feet. I’ve spent time in these sets, looked at them from all angles, tweaked them, opened doors in them. They start to feel pretty real.

Footloose and Floating Free

We knew two things about this set before I designed it: it was a prison, and there would be no gravity to speak of. I decided to interpret that as a labyrinthian network of doors, hallways, chutes, and ladders. The walls, ceiling, and floors are interchangeable in a room where ‘up’ means nothing.

Edmonton landmark

I’m not going to bury the lead here: I love Bay/Enterprise Square LRT Station. When I’m in in, I feel like I’m a hundred years in the future and a million miles away. I hope you agree.

To say I borrowed from the aesthetic of it is a pretty heinous misuse of the word ‘borrow.’ I wanted the design of the interior of the space station to almost seem like we actually filmed it inside this Edmonton landmark.