Production Designer Nicole Northridge & Composer Atli Örvarsson Talk Worlding-Building of Silo Season 2
This Article Includes Spoilers for ‘Silo’ Season 2.
Apple TV+ has quickly made a name for itself as the go-to streaming platform for high-brow mysteries with series like Silo. Based on the trilogy of novels by Hugh Howey, Silo takes place in a ruined future where humanity exists in massive underground Silos. The finale of season one revealed that the Silo that houses our main character, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), is not the only one in existence. Silo’s season two sees Juliette leaving Silo 17 behind for the unknown and flooded world of Silo 18, where she discovers a survivor who has holed himself up in the locked IT department. Season two furthers the mystery of the Silos and lays the groundwork for the already-announced seasons three and four, which will end the series.
Behind the scenes, production designer Nicole Northridge and composer Atli Örvarsson played important roles in developing the show’s second season. Örvarsson also scored season one, but Northridge was new to the team for season two. Both Northridge and Örvarsson sat down with FilmSpeak to discuss their work in creating Silo 17, the distinct challenges of the show’s insular atmosphere, and the jaw-dropping final scene of the season.
There are pros and cons to being a newcomer or a returning part of the Silo team. Northridge had a preexisting Silo design to recreate in Silo 17 before she put her own spin on it.
“You have to stick to the aesthetics of the Silo, because that's a world that has been established. You then have the freedom to create, from your imagination, the spaces within the Silo, keeping in mind the aesthetic, keeping in mind that the population has lived there for 350 years,” Northridge explains. “We know that every Silo was built in an almost factory-like process. They all had the same 144 levels. Every single Silo is laid out exactly the same…essentially, once those doors are closed, it becomes a closed, sealed environment and you grow as a generation within those silos.”
She continues, “My initial pitch to the showrunners, directors, and producers was that Silo 17 be the Silo of color, pattern, and texture. A textural world where the people were progressive. They were creators, they were artists. The team loved the idea, so we just ran with it. And then they turned the lights off in the Silo and flooded it, and you couldn't see a thing (laughs).”
For Örvarsson, the challenge lay in wanting to reference his work from the previous season while also expanding on the foundation he built.
“The wheel has been invented, if you will,” says Örvarsson. “It's kind of a double-edged sword to have the tunes from season one because you don't want to repeat yourself. You need to sort of stay true to the show. It's important to find a way to kind of reinvent those tunes as well, and sort of keep an evolution going.”
“The obvious, biggest difference between the two Silos is that one of them is filled with people, and the other one just has a few souls living in there,” Örvarsson explains. “The hustle and bustle of the first Silo lends itself to a bit more humanity, perhaps. The second season is much more about this alien, isolated, really lonely world that Juliette and Solo are experiencing. My biggest guidepost was, how do I make this sound really, really lonely, as if it wasn't lonely enough.”
One of the biggest differences between the two Silos is that Silo 17 is almost entirely flooded with water. The underwater scenes are a mix of practical and computer-generated effects. For Northridge, this meant finding a tank to build key sets. Of course, it’s not that simple, as the production team was unable to find a tank anywhere in the country big enough for what they needed.
“We built a massive tank in our studio,” Northridge explains. “We had a really tight schedule of turnarounds as well. The sets we built into the tank, we had to ensure we could uncover sections which we had pre-dressed to allow it to be the next level that Juliet explores, or the next room that she goes into.”
“The last set we would need to see was on the bottom and then we covered it with other dressing and other flooring because the water was not drained. We had to reveal everything via an underwater prop team,” she continues. “It was bonkers. We built an almost-360-degree set. The divers loved it. Actually, Rebecca Ferguson, she loved it. She went diving in it for fun!”
Since the majority of the show takes place within a Silo, it only makes sense that a silo played a role in Örvarsson’s composing process.
“I took a bunch of instruments to a decommissioned herring oil silo from the ’40s and ’50s in Iceland,” he explains. “It's just been empty for decades. It's a world in and of itself, and that's something that I've been really kind of fascinated with in the past few years. This sort of idea of not just capturing a sound and a melody or a piece of music, but actually capturing a space. There's an added dimension that comes from being in a space that relates to the story in a way like that.”
The finale scene of Silo season two is a flashback to the world before the Silo way of life. For the first time, the audience is shown an openness that is in direct contrast with the compact nature of the Silos. For Northridge, this scene was simply a matter of making it as mundane as possible.
“We just wanted to make it so normal that the more mundane it is, the more alien it is to the world of Silo,” Northridge says. “It's the little things that you start to realize they just don't know about. They don't feel the warmth of the night, rain on their skin, or the pollution from the cars. They will never get that wide vista. They just do not live within that world.”
Check out the full interviews with Nicole Northridge and Atli Örvarsson below.
