Sanctuary For All - Production

Production

The producers wished to feature the series in a fictional city, Old City, located in the West Coast of North America. The working name for the city was "Odisburg". The idea behind Alexi's "creepy" expressions in the beginning of the episode were Wiebe's idea, and the producers granted his request.

Both parts of the episode were effectively reshoots of the first of the original webisodes. According to director Martin Wood, much of the footage of the webisodes were reshot in a very similar style. The producers decided not to include virtual sets for the first 20 minutes of the episode, in order to lull the audience to a false sense of security, so the production crew filmed on location. The apartment building from the beginning of the episode were shot at the partially decommissioned Riverview mental care facility. Because the producers found the location "creepy", they felt the location could be used to impart this creepiness to the audience. In the 18 months between the webisodes and the series, Wiebe grew taller. The corpses used in the beginning were mannequins the props department had in their possession and put holes in the forehead, and were easier to use than actors.

Like the web series, much of the episodes were filmed on green screen. The production team performed over 480 visual effects shots, compared to 12 visual effects shots from an average Stargate episode. Amanda Tapping (also executive producer of the series) described the process of using the green screen like doing theatre, and hasn't used green screen to an extent during her tenure in Stargate. The opening shot for the premiere took three months for special effects supervisor Lee Wilson's Vancouver-based company to complete.