Defying gravity

Showrunner Peter Harness and director Michelle MacLaren reveal how they conceived, planned and filmed spectacular zero-gravity sequences set aboard the International Space Station for the first episode of Apple TV+ series Constellation.

On the legendary Studio Babelsberg sound stages in Germany, the second oldest film studio in the world, the experience of being up in space was brought down to Earth for Apple TV+ drama Constellation.

The story introduces Swedish astronaut Johanna ‘Jo’ Ericsson (Noomi Rapace), a member of a five-person team of international astronauts conducting a research mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in Earth’s low orbit.

The crew, representing NASA, Roscosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been in space for nearly a year conducting scientific tests, including experiments with NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory quantum physics module under the direction of Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), chief science consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a former Apollo mission astronaut.

Jo is tasked with studying the psychological effects of long-term space travel and, while away, she deeply misses her English husband, Magnus (James D’Arcy), a primary school teacher, and their nine-year-old daughter Alice (Davina Coleman and Rosie Coleman), who reside in a suburban home near the ESA compound in Cologne, Germany. Despite regular communication with her family, the extended separation takes a toll on her.

Then when the station is struck suddenly by a mysterious object, Jo performs a spacewalk to better understand what has happened and is shocked to discover that the mummified body of a Soviet-era female cosmonaut collided with the ISS – but was it real or a hallucination?

With life-support systems damaged, the surviving crew members face a critical decision: they must return to Earth using the operational Soyuz 2, but one must stay behind and repair the second, damaged, return capsule, Soyuz 1. Jo selflessly volunteers to remain on the ISS, but with her oxygen supply rapidly falling, she is left to confront the haunting silence of space in the hope of reuniting with her family.

The first episode of the series, which launches today, features these spectacular zero-gravity sequences, which were filmed over five weeks aboard a fully reconstructed ISS that was built at Studio Babelsberg under the supervision of production designer Andy Nicholson (Gravity).

He was tasked with designing the near-life-sized replica of the station, though the American and Russian sections were constructed on opposing sides of the studio because they were too big to connect together. With no blueprints to follow, the ISS was recreated as authentically as possible using video footage and the huge archive of photographs of the station.

Before filming the zero-gravity sequences, the five astronaut actors – William Catlett (who plays Paul Lancaster), Henry David (Ilya Andreev), Yazmina Suri (Sandra Teles), Carole Weyers (Audrey Brostin) and Rapace – took part in a boot camp that saw them hooked up to an elaborate wire harness system, while NASA astronaut Scott Kelly offered advice and insights based on his own record-breaking 520 days in space across four missions.

On set, wires were used as little as possible, owing to a preference for in-camera techniques to capture the feeling that the actors were moving unrestricted, in all directions, aboard the ISS. The views of Earth from the ISS windows were actually photographs, rather than green-screen projections.

Then for the spacewalk sequence, Kelly again spoke about his experiences of being inside freezing, incredibly rigid spacesuits. A female perspective on space flight was also sought from fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir.

Produced by Haut et Court TV and Turbine Studios, the series comes from creator and showrunner Peter Harness, who teamed up with lead director Michelle MacLaren to bring these space-set sequences to life.

Here, Harness and MacLaren tell DQ how these scenes aboard the ISS established their ambitions for the series and how they were realised from the page to the screen.

Peter, what were your ambitions with those opening scenes in space?
Harness: The ambition was really to make it look as realistic as possible, because the story goes to some weird and wonderful places, and you earn the right to do that by being very grounded and authentic in the reality you’re conveying in the world you’re building – not only emotionally, in terms of real people in real situations, but also texturally with how you technically make the scenes. I wrote this and I was fully aware that it was going to be very difficult to film and very expensive. And then I gave it to Michelle.

What does the script look like when you write scenes like this? How descriptive are you in terms of how you see the scenes playing out?
Harness: I write fairly visually; I’m able to picture it in my head. And the further I get on with the script, I can go to bed at night and kind of watch the episode in my head. But when you get into the practicalities of making it and there’s a whole design for the ISS and we’re doing things in a certain way, we map it out together really, in terms of what we think we can achieve. Sometimes we realise we probably can’t achieve that, but we can achieve something else which is equally cool, so then it becomes a real dialogue between us and everybody working on it.

Michelle, what were your first thoughts reading the script about how you would film these scenes?
MacLaren: I spent a lot of time in pre-vis and with storyboard artists designing the sequences, because you really have to break it down into the minutiae, into every single shot. So that was a lot of work in prep. You have to be very specific because the stunt people need to train and they need to design the set to break apart where you need to put wires or cameras or whatever it is you need from a technical point of view. Each shot has to be designed ahead of time.

We did that with a combination of pre-vis and storyboards, so you almost get to see it before you shoot it. But in actual execution, it’s very difficult because you’ve got actors hanging on wires, you’ve got cameras sometimes on wires, cameras on dollies or cameras on cranes. Or if we’ve used a drone or a bunch of gimbal camera rigs – it’s a real combination. We had to learn what’s the best camera rig for this particular action or this particular moment. We had to rehearse all these moves because it’s just not a simple explosion, it’s an explosion in space. And then you’ve got the special effects element of flying debris.

Some of that was practical and some of it was CGI. It’s an incredible collaboration with an awesome team. Andy Nicholson built the ISS, Martin Goeres was our stunt coordinator, and our cinematographer was Markus Förderer. We all worked really closely together to design and execute the sequence. It was painfully time-consuming because it’s like saying, ‘OK, we’re going to do an action sequence, and now you have to stand on one leg and put your hand on your head and jump while you do it.’ It’s a completely different animal, but very exciting and challenging.

How did you find the balance between special and practical effects?
MacLaren: I prefer to do as much in-camera as possible. That’s the way I always approach things. But it’s inevitable something like this is a combination of green screen. There’s a lot of CGI in this, but we did do a lot practically. For example, when they’re fighting a fire [on the ISS], the actors did actually spray off fire extinguishers, but not all the fire extinguisher smoke is real. Some of it is CGI. Obviously the fire is all CG, but them flying backwards, that was all done practically on rigs. You’ve got wires coming through your ceiling, so there’s no ceiling on fire. You have to put that in.

Our visual effects supervisor, Doug Larmour, did an amazing job. So it was a massive collaboration with visual effects, special effects, stunts, the art department, the props. But much of it is practical. We never did anything that was just against a green screen. We were always on a piece of the set, even for the exterior spacewalk. They built pieces of the exterior of the ISS that were hung in the stage, and our actors and our stunt people are on wires and we would shoot against pieces of this exterior set and then they would do a set extension [in visual effects]. So again, that was all designed in pre-vis. It was so expensive. We had to basically create that in pre-visualisation ahead of time, get that signed off by everybody and then go and shoot it – and shooting it was a whole different animal because things change, challenges come up.

Harness: Those exterior set blocks were life-sized. They were massive. We had a whole extra studio for them. You walked out of the main ISS studio and then there were these guys building these enormous things – and those space suits as well. The suits weigh something like 350kg.

MacLaren: They’re real spacesuits. We got two of them because they were really expensive. But they were incredible in their design. They come off in pieces so if you’re shooting above the waist, they wouldn’t have the legs on, but it was very hard for the actors to move in. I put one on and it is so claustrophobic, it’s absolutely terrifying, and they were flying while doing it.

We actually had this really cool rig that Noomi used where she was attached to the end of a solid arm, and they could move the arm around. So rather than having wires, it was like they drove her around on the end of a crane, so to speak, and that actually worked really well because we could put it on a dolly. So when she was flying back, they were actually pulling her back on the dolly. Martin Goeres invented that. A lot of rigs were designed specifically for the action on the show.

tagged in: Apple TV+, Constellation, Haut et Court TV, Michelle MacLaren, Peter Harness, Turbine Studios