The most successful prequel of today’s television is about to reach the midpoint of its second season, and we continue uncovering the secrets behind the scenes of Outlander: Blood of My Blood. After learning which era the protagonists would travel to if they could time travel, two of the heavyweights of the team working behind the production revealed to us, exclusively for Spain, those small details that are essential to turning the eighteenth‑century setting into a show that is rich in detail.
Mike Gunn, in charge of production design, and Stuart Rice, responsible for the set decoration, were our guides on our tour of the sets of Outlander: Blood of My Blood. A huge industrial hangar where, from one set to another, it was possible to find furniture, decorative elements, or the famous Craigh na Dun stones that have provided so many journeys for the protagonists of both the original series and its prequel.
The tour began by putting us in context and sharing one of the team’s recurring remarks: “the five‑star TripAdvisor castle is Bownmont Castle, the three‑star is Leoch Castle, and the one‑star is Leoch Castle. But even if this is the most horrible, damp, and spooky castle we have, it’s always entertaining and, in this cheap Airbnb world of the twenty‑first century, it’s always a place where everyone says: ‘Oh my God, this is incredible! This is where I want to vacation.’”
From concept to set in three months
When it comes to bringing to life the sets where the characters of Outlander: Blood of My Blood will move, Rice revealed that his work begins with research. “From the script, I know what I have to search for. And this research comes from a lot of books, the internet, or even meeting with people, historians.” Once he knows the era well and what could be found in each room, “I make sketches of how it will look in terms of size, atmosphere, color and tone, and I give them to the art department.” They draw it, and after some final tweaks, it’s ready for the construction team to start work. Up to this point, Rice acknowledges that they need “about three or four weeks,” to which a similar period must be added for the work to be carried out.
Jamie Roy and Rory Alexander in a still from Outlander: Blood of My Blood.
Therefore, when imagining the sets of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, Rice acknowledges that “the only limit is time. The number of departments we work with is the best toolbox you could imagine. And anything I think of that I want or that I find in the research that we want to recreate, they can do. But I think this season we have between 170 and 180 decorates, including exteriors, so there is a huge amount of rotation that we have to manage and time is essential.”
And after construction comes the ambience, something that requires, on average, another three weeks. “But beforehand,” Gunn notes, “there is a lot of preparation: making furniture, having all the textiles ready, making sure we have options so that when construction finishes we can step in and do our best work.” Reuse of the decor is especially important here. “When I design a set from scratch,” Gunn explains, “I always think about how it can be modified easily and quickly” by changing the room’s layout or creating a new one. This undoubtedly helps maximize the possibilities when filming the production’s scenes.
Recycle, Rebuild, and Maybe Buy
For the ambience, Rice acknowledges that the nearby era in which Julia and Henry’s story is set in the flashbacks is less complicated than the rest of the production: “The things from the 20th century are much more accessible than those of the 17th and 18th centuries. What we usually do when we have sets like this (we found ourselves in the space that serves as Julia’s attic in London) is to try to buy as much as possible. We work on it, even recovering books and we are constantly looking for small details and trying to preserve them.”
The dinnerware, the linens, or the curtains are some of the elements the production team has to create from scratch when it comes to the eighteenth-century scenes.
And perhaps to rebuild them. Because the production leans into recycling, giving new life to everything that is built with wood, “between six and ten times,” Gunn says, “until it is screwed down too far. Everything has a long life.” Almost as long as the life given to the interior sets of Leoch Castle, which had already appeared in the original series. “We modified them a bit because the story was set 30 years earlier,” Gunn explained. “The balconies we had added for this version reached the chimney and cut the window in half. So we lowered them. There was a back‑side fireplace, between these two windows, where our main characters seemed the devil, sitting by a blazing fire all the time.”
“This is one of the sets,” continued the production designer of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, “where if I look around there are only a few chairs that serve for everything regarding the scenery and we manufacture everything here: the tables, the stools, all the lighting. Everything has been created by our incredibly talented teams, with whom we employ many tricks so that it looks like it was made in that era.”
Let There Be Light
Among the main challenges historical productions face is lighting, which must adhere to the era portrayed but also allow filming to take place. And in Outlander: Blood of My Blood, they have spent a lot of time developing effective, yet healthy, lighting. “In recent years, to reduce the amount of smoke and particles in the air, we spoke with candle manufacturers and changed the formula. We did many tests at the beginning, last year, and ended up creating one that produces much less smoke. It looks the same, since the color pigmentation represents a 1715 beeswax candle, but it hardly produces smoke and the size and the color of the flame remain the same,” explained Gunn.
Harriet Slater is Ellen McKenzie in Outlander: Blood of My Blood.
However, candles cannot be used near the camera, so “this year we also developed LED candles, created several different versions to represent different heights, diameters and color temperatures of the candles. We can raise them and lower them, and the lighting department can control them.” All this matters greatly because the light is responsible for how the tones of the clothing, the table linens, or the tapestries on the walls look. That is why they run “camera tests at the start of each season to see how they reflect, how they react, how fabrics refract light at different candle temperatures. We work a lot on the process behind the final tone, the texture.”
“When you go to source fabrics,” revealed Gunn, “you often don’t find the color palette of the production and the tones you are looking for. So we keep changing the color of things all the time, so we are always looking for fabrics that are truly adaptable so we can use them and perhaps reuse them to look different.” This also shows physically in the tapestries, which, according to Gunn, “are a fundamental part of the story. We have made hundreds of them. We are always looking for new designs. They are very useful for transforming a set; we can hide a door, for example—it’s a clever tool.”
Fans Are Important
Regarding the success of Outlander: Blood of My Blood and the fandom that exists behind the universe created by Diana Gabaldon, both Gunn and Rice acknowledge that “it’s fun” to pay attention to the details that viewers focus on and enjoy including nods in the sets that they know will pique their interest. “There are hidden nods throughout the entire series,” Rice admitted, before revealing that many of the accessories of Outlander can be seen in the prequel. “There are all sorts of things we deliberately play with.”
Hermione Corfield is Julia Moriston in Outlander: Blood of My Blood.
As for example, in Julia’s house, which is a true homage to those hidden nods that shape the characters of Claire and Brianna, both from her mother and grandmother. “It’s a lot of fun to include small details of Brianna’s character, of Claire’s character from Outlander, all the botanical sketches, the art, the fact that she fixes clocks, which I think was part of the first season’s script. So there are many small details about how those characters developed,” Rice revealed.
