Production
Although the real Big Brother House is in Elstree Studios, Borehamwood, the house featured in Dead Set is a purpose built set on a former military base in Virginia Water, Surrey, owned by QinetiQ. This site has also housed other productions including Holby Blue, Primeval and Echo Beach. Filming for the series took place over the summer of 2008. Pippa's eviction was filmed outside the real Big Brother house during Belinda's eviction - in front of a real Friday night eviction audience - leading to a small continuity error as the Big Brother series 9 logo was visible instead of the fictional version.
According to the DVD release, scenes featuring the undead Davina McCall were filmed in one day, and the bodies lying around the corridor during the scene were created with SFX dummies (besides Eugene Sully's, which McCall is seen feasting on). McCall stated that she was covered in bruises the next day, due to hammering on the door in several scenes. She based her zombie-running style on the T-1000 from the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. As she was restricted to only one day's filming, a dummy of McCall was used in some scenes for which she was unavailable.
Filming of the series was found to be difficult, due to budgetary constraints. Some extras were redressed to play different zombies due to the cost of the contact lenses used as zombie eyes; and the scene in Episode 2 in which Alex and Riq's car breaks down was originally meant to be an explosive car crash. Many of the zombies featured in the crowd scenes - including the final assault on the house - were volunteers recruited through Dead Set creator Charlie Brooker's Facebook group.
A map for the Borehamwood region, the site of the real Big Brother House, was added to the Urban Dead MMORPG - with a competition to win a copy of the DVD as part of the promotion of the series.
Read more about this topic: Dead Set (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)