Behind The Scenes Set Tour

(upbeat music) - Here we are at the set for Skeldale House behind me and we've built the set in an old mill building as you can see from the roof if it's not in the best of repair but we've used all of its charms, we've even used one of the columns from the original building in a scullery which I'll show you in a moment, over here we've got the photo backings, but we don't see a great deal of them through the windows, but they're just to give shapes so that we're not shooting out to blankness, we've got a piece of wall here that replicates one of the walls in Grassington where we also take these signs back so that there's continuity there and then looking at the front of the house there's portico and the railings are items that we will actually do wig and take with us to Grassington where we shoot Darby and we attach this to the front of the house that we use as our exterior in Grassington.

So coming through the front doors, we've got a set of double doors here and an internal door, the reason that we usually in sets we give ourselves a buffer zone so that when we're cutting between exterior Grassington Darby and interior set we've got a series of doors that we can use to allow us to create those interchanges between actors without it being obvious that we've cut from a location to the set, so do come in, you can see here that the tiled floor of the hallway mimics the hallway in the original house in Thirsk in the museum and also makes reference to those Dutch paintings that we use to sell inspiration at the start of the project.

This area here we call the waiting area, so this is where clients will come and see the vets, so they will sit in these chairs in this area here and wait to see the vets in these rooms here, so the idea is that we wanted the people who were coming with the animals to almost be a part of the everyday life of the house, so when someone's sitting here with a dog on their lap or something, Mrs.

Hall might be walking through with a tray of tea and it's all got to feel like it's part of their everyday world.

So first, the first examination room we've got here we've used all this redid glass and got blinds that they can play with up and down to sort of make the rooms more private or not and this is Siegfried's examination room, you'll be able to see if you look up that some of the rooms have got part ceilings in and we allow spaces to be open so that we can put lights in from the top as well, so Siegfried's room has areas of chaos which is exhibited here and this is kind of his admin life which is a little bit chaotic, but when it comes to actual procedures and working with animals, he's completely laser focused on what he does, so there are parts of this room which are very tidy and very orderly and parts that are quite chaotic, so that was what we're trying to achieve here.

And then through this door, we have another examination room which we begin the series it's being used as a junk room really, but this is where James ends up working and so what's nice about this layout is that we get the opportunity to interconnect between the rooms, we can then look back into the hallway through these doors here and then all the way down the corridor behind me with again with a tile floor through the dispensary, because the vets often have to go into the dispensary to collect ointments and what have you and bring it back in here, so it means that the actors are never have to leave shortly they can just disappear into the depths of the set, so from here, we're gonna go back into the hallway again, into the waiting area and we can see through the doorway here which we'll come back to in a moment is where Siegfried has his office but this is a corridor we'll sneak us through all the way through to the back of the house, but gives you glimpses through into other rooms all the way.

(upbeat music) This point here is quite important, the bottom of the stairs, the telephone a lot of action happens in this spot here, so again, we have the opportunity for the camera to be at the top of the stairs, looking down it can be in the dining room over there to look this way and then we have another door here to allow a sense of depth, so the artists will come careering down these stairs as though this is a two story house, in fact the stairs finish at that point where that window is up there and then we cut to another set which is the bedroom set further back in the studio.

We've got an equipment room under the stairs there and then this is the dispensary, so the dispensary has a view through to the walkway, which means that Mrs.

Hall can go past the window, wrap on the window to make sure that Tristan who's often working in here is aware when Siegfried is back in the house, so he knows to look busy.

This is a nice example of how we want to texture and the kind of color palette of the sort of home baking and the warm somethings by using Lincrusta which is a traditional texted wallpaper and then having papers that have pattern but always against soft colored backgrounds, so it means that behind the actors' heads the background is soft, so we're focusing on the actors.

There's a little bit there, which would lead to a garden but actually leads to where our producers link and then through this walkway, which is meant to be, so it's built on to the outside of the house and there would be a garden through here, through this window is the dispensary, so Mrs.

Hall keeps her vegetables, egg, bits of gardening equipment, wellies, flowerpots et cetera, but then we're into the Mrs.

Hall's wealth really in this room, so this is the scullery I'm referring to back to these columns which belong to the original building, this is one of the original ones, this isn't, if we were to put the set somewhere else we'd have to replace that one so around me here is Mrs.

Hall's world and this wallpaper is the wallpaper which we found at the very beginning of the project which symbolizes what we were trying to achieve with the tone of the project, so it has those buttery colors, it has an underlying structure which I thought was reminiscent of the dry stone walls and the landscape and this kind of sensuous organic plant forms going throughout, so that was a kind of metaphor that we used really for the whole set.

In this main space here, we have an auger, which it looks like it works, it doesn't really, but we make it look like it works, we've got a sink which does work and another cooker here, Mrs.

Hall spends a lot of time in this room, preparing meals, talking to Siegfried and James and Tristan and keeping their lives on track, really.

This is the back of the set, this is where all the mess is, over here we've got the set for James's bedroom, we have little bits of Dingle that we hang outside to look like the tops of the tree from a shooting in that set, this is the dining room, all the kind of significant meals happen in the bigger meals like the Sunday lunches and the Christmas dinners and what have you happened in this room, this room links directly to the sitting room through these double doors.

This is Siegfried's office and this is really a kind of quite critical room in the house, in that it's imbued with a lot of history of his character, so his wife in story has died four years previously and this would have been her music room, so we have a piano in here and we know that Siegfried likes has a passion for music, so he plays occasionally, he has photographs of his wife in this room, he has momentos if you like from the First World War, this is where he does his admin, his main admin, so we try to kind of create this idea that he's a very reluctant account payer, shall we say, so he doesn't chase up and when people owe him money, he forgets to do that and that's what he uses stress Tristan for a lot of the time, but it's quite chaotic this scrumbleness bits of paper and things in this room and newspapers and his pipe and what have you.

And then as we move through here, we've got a gramophone here, so sometimes Siegfried will sit in this chair and listen to music, the fireplace's will have working although they're not real fires in the sense that we think of them in our normal houses they're done by special effects, so they don't generate much heat, so we end up having these lovely things lying around to keep us and the actors warm in between takes.

This is the main sitting room, so we have a lots of options to where actors can sit and have dialogue with each other, it's a bigger room than probably what you would have in a real Georgian house, we've exaggerated all the room sizes really by about 10% to allow us to work easily in them but always they look smaller on camera, so that was the reason for that decision.

These two windows, this big one here and this one at the side here, they are matching to the house that we use in Grassington, so when we go to Grassington to film, we always put these curtains and that's up at the windows to create, help sell that idea and then we've got a little snug over here where Siegfried sometimes set some weeds and it's to sort of get away from it all but from this vantage point he can keep an eye on everybody pretty much in the house.

So I hope you've enjoyed the tour.