Inside Sanctuary

With her Stargate days (mostly) behind her, Amanda Tapping is coming back to Sci Fi Channel. This time it’s with Sanctuary, a series that is pioneering some new techniques for television production. Tapping plays “Dr. Helen Magnus,” who “has dedicated her life to tracking abnormals, exotic creatures that hide among us. Aided in her mission are her fearless daughter Ashley, her new recruit, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Will Zimmerman.” The panel featured Tapping and Robert Dunne who plays Zimmerman, producers Sam Egan, Martin Wood and Damian Kindler. Sanctuary is notable because of its production method. The show will shoot on a green screen stage and utilize digital sets much in the way Sin City and 300 were made. It’s a revolutionary step for television, and one the series employed when it began as a web series before making the move to Sci Fi as a TV series.

Tapping talked about working in this way, and how it “ups the stakes” for her as a performer. “It’s huge,” she said. “It’s not that much different than actually shooting on a real set, once you get over the chroma key green headache, which lasts about three days. Our director of photography David Gettis is an artist, and he paints with light. It’s the best way I can describe it. You don’t feel like you’re standing in front of a green screen. You actually feel like you’re in the catacombs under Rome or on an island off Scottland. We go everywhere. Once you get used to it, it doesn’t feel like you’re on a sound stage anymore.”

Kindler talked about the shows origins as a web series and the evolution into a cable TV series. “We basically introduced the concept of the series with the webisodes and really kind of cut our teeth on how we’d like to try to shoot it,” he said. “The series on television is a complete overhaul, like a re-boot of the concept. Even though it has the same cast and the same concept, it’s much broader in scope and deeper and the characters are more dimensional. I think it’s for more accessible to a wider audience. We’re really proud of it because the concept withstands all that brilliantly. In fact, it absolutely flourishes when you begin to add all these dimensions to it. It doesn’t need to stay this sort of rainy, dark thing. You can do all sorts of things with it and it begins even cooler.”

Tapping plays Magnus with an English accent, and she takes about how this came about and what it reveals about the character. “It’s part of her history,” she says. “Helen Magnus dates back to Victorian era England, and it’s an important part of who she is. It informs a lot about her eccentricities and where she came from. She’s from that era. She’s was one of the first females who was allowed to audit the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons.

She’s one of those people who just pushes the envelope and the boundaries of science and technology and thinking and has always done so.” “So it was important to me as an actor that she stayed true to that part of her lineage, and one of her eccentricities is that she fiercely holds on to the Britishisms that she was born with. So she will only drink tea, and she speaks with the Queen’s English even though I’ve tried to broaden the accent a little bit because she’s lived around the world and is 157 years old.”

Although Tapping has said she’ll likely play Samantha Carter in some iteration of Stargate in the future, she talked about what it was like to leave her regular role behind. “It’s like leaving home. I used this analogy earlier today. It’s like you have the option of? ?  and I did have the option of going to a community college and staying in my parents’ house, i.e., the Stargate franchise or traveling across the country and getting a dorm room and going to a different university, which is what I’ve chosen to do. I’ve just chosen really weird roommates.” “It was a huge emotional thing,” she continued. “Honestly, many tears and many “Oh, my God.” It was a huge leap of faith, and when I chose to sort of embrace the idea that Sanctuary was where I wanted to be, we didn’t have a television pickup at the time, and I was offered a very nice Stargate contract, but it really was time to make a leap.

And I so believe in this project, and I so believe that if, you know, it weren’t SCI FI, which was the network we were hopeful for, that somebody would embrace it, and so I turned down Stargate before I knew where we were going to end up. And we ended up exactly where we hoped. It was a very soft landing for me because I know this network well, and I’m really comfortable here.”

The producers talked about the large canvass the green screen method allows them to use. Wood said “One of the fun things about it, too, is that the difference between doing a television series on green screen and doing a movie on green screen is you tend to be? ?  a movie tends to be a one-off kind of set. You’re in this set, this is what happens, so if Robin runs too far, it doesn’t mean he’s run through a wall. It just means you don’t put the wall there when you’re actually creating it.” “When you have standing sets that are virtual that you have to keep going back to, that’s when it becomes tricky for the actors because now it’s like there’s no door. So even though you want to exit that way, there’s no door there. You have to come this way and go around here, and you’re going around little tiny pieces of green tape on the floor.”

Egan added “The real joy of green screen, for me, happens not on the stage, but in the story room where fundamentally as a producer, writer, storyteller, you’re not bound by what you can build, but only by your imagination.”

Source: IGN Entertainment