The ceiling is purposely too low - around 7 feet, 9 inches, Hindle said - to create a feeling of comfort and snugness and, conversely, claustrophobia and menace. “It’s the weirdest room ever,” Hindle said, comparing the jungle gym of desks to “an umbilical cord underground.” (Another birthing allegory!) The wide, white-walled room is drenched in fluorescent light, with an island of four connected desks in the center against an astroturf-green carpet. The main office set for the “Macrodata Refinement team,” where Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) spend their entire innie lives, sets the tone of the show, Hindle said. The office that feels more like a ‘playground’
Many of those details may never make it into frame, Baseman said, but they contribute to the haunting atmosphere - and provide fun Easter eggs for eager viewers to catch during a rewatch. Selvig, her home is a mess of burnt cookies, framed needlepoints devoted to Lumon’s tenets and that disturbing shrine to a Lumon luminary. Cobell, her office is scantly decorated at home, where she’s Mrs. Patricia Arquette’s opaque, eccentric character with a dual life required double the details - at work, where she’s Ms. The cars its characters drive are slightly outdated station wagons and similar models the desktop computers the core four innies work at are bulky, rounded and retro. There’s not a pen out of place within Lumon - even the fake foods in the office vending machines were selected with a purpose.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER JOBS NEAR ME SERIES
To do that, Baseman said, the team behind the series - including executive producer and director Ben Stiller and showrunner Dan Erickson - focused as much on the background minutiae as they did the broader design. “We just wanted to create a new world we hadn’t seen before.” “Part of the mystique of ‘Severance’ is, you’re just not really sure where you are or when you are,” Baseman said. (The exterior of the Lumon building was shot at an existing mid-century building, the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in New Jersey.) But the very concept of “Severance” makes it feel like a futuristic dystopia. There are clear nods to the mid-century offices of “Mad Men” or “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” structures that are stylish, precise and somehow still practical. Part of the allure of “Severance” is its inability to be placed in time, an effect that was created with painstaking detail, Baseman and Hindle said. The details, big and small, that make ‘Severance’
CNN spoke to Hindle and set decorator Andrew Baseman, also nominated for an Emmy for his work on the series, about how they created the deeply unsettling world of “Severance,” where everything is stunning and ever so slightly off. That guiding principle - that the world of “Severance” should be beautiful and chilling at once - helped mold the Apple TV+ drama into one of the most exciting, perplexing and visually striking series of 2022, earning it 14 Emmy nominations.