Falling Skies Behind The Scenes: Greg Beeman talks Love and other acts of courage

This weeks episode also marks the return of Daniyah Ysrayl as Rick.

I love Daniyah and got to know both he an his close-knit family in Toronto last year. He is a funny, fun-loving kid with great respect for his parents, who sings and plays music with his brother…

He also got very close with Connor last year. And he also loves to goof around and flirt with Moon. Like any sane man, he has a huge crush on her, and she is very sweet back to him. All-in-all Daniyah is very fun to have around.. We were all sad his character wasn’t immediately returning for season 2, but Remi felt there was no further way to develop Rick on an ongoing basis. But then he came up with the amazing twist from this episode….

This weeks episode had a lot of implications for Ben and the 2nd masses understanding of the skitters. Checkout what Greg Beeman had to say about the ‘war cry’ Ben and the skitters did.

The opening scene – which depicted the various skitters on the rooftops of a demolished city, engaged in some kind of ritual chant, or war cry; and then Ben appearing and joining into their voices – sent chills down my spine. The scene struck me as having a spiritual component to it – and while this is not completely illuminated – it seemed (to me at least) to imply an answer Karen had asked last year: “Do the skitters have a God?”

It ended up being a very elaborate and complex scene to conceive of and shoot. First, as always we had to have a lot of meetings to talk about “What is it” and “How will it look”? Director John Dhal storyboarded the sequence which gave us a great jumping off point. It was decided by all that we would do a series of sweeping crane shots over and past the skitters and that we would depict them on different roofs. The problem is, we only had one skitter body and two heads. The “Red-Eye Head” and the “non-Red Eye head.” We also decided that we’d have to shoot these shots on a green screen stage, with a partial set that the art department would construct. Then Zoic Studios, the visual effects house we use, would build the backgrounds with CGI. Still it had to be efficient and budgetable. Production Designer, Rob Gray, a generally brilliant guy, had many specific ideas about how he would build one set with various setpieces that we could quickly change around.

But the part of the scene with Ben was more complex than that. Mostly because he was moving and running – he couldn’t be on green screen. We would have to find an appropriate roof! Our location scouts searched and found something very cool. There is an old sugar factory in Vancouver made of very ancient brick that has a great rooftop. Of course you have to go up a rickety old elevator and then climb three or four flights of rickety stairs to get to it. At first it felt impractical to go up there. The ascent was too difficult for the full crew… But a stripped down second unit crew with, literally just a camera crew, a couple of makeup artists, the director and Connor – no sound crew- no lights – could it.

Checkout more Behind the Scenes information on this episode, at Greg Beemans blog.

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