How ‘The Shining,’ ‘Dune’ and Coffin Houses Impressed the Housing and Workplace Areas of ‘Add’ Season 3

[This story includes mild spoilers for Upload season three, episode three “Cyber Discount Day” and episode four “Download Doctor.”]

In Add‘s model of the long run, the place folks dwell and work is horrifying.

To be honest, creator Greg Daniels’ thoughts isn’t solely chargeable for season three’s terrifying visions of what society’s private {and professional} areas might be amid the speedy enlargement of tech and digital life. A lot of the duty for this bleak-looking future — the key add name middle, momentary temp company and “Decreased Circumstance Housing” the place Nathan (Robbie Amell) and Andy (Andy Allo) come to stick with his mother (Jessica Tuck) — in episodes three and 4 have been primarily based on actual ideas and locations tied to houses and workplaces.

Director Tom Marshall, says he pulled from the “very actual world of this time,” together with Hong Kong’s coffin homes for episode three’s housing design. In line with The Guardian, one such model was simply 500 sq. ft that includes as much as 30 residents, reduce up with plywood bunk beds that every have their very own sliding door. Others, in keeping with a 2017 photograph essay in The Atlantic, don’t even depart sufficient room for residents to stretch out their legs.

“It was, depressingly, kind of straightforward to get plenty of references for these varieties of locations,” Marshall says. “There was additionally one thing that manufacturing confirmed me which was truly for college students. It was a shared residing lodging, however the huge factor that caught out was that there have been no home windows on this constructing. It was designed simply to get as many individuals in and maximize house for as little cash as attainable.”

Marshall is chatting with each current pupil housing on the College of Michigan in Ann Arbor and deliberate housing for the College of California, Santa Barbara. Each are receiving substantial seed funding from Charles Munger, Warren Buffett’s enterprise associate.

The coed housing at UC Santa Barbara has already seen one architect resign as a guide on the college’s design overview committee for the dorm, which The New York Occasions experiences would home over 4,500 college students, crammed “right into a 1.7-million-square-foot, 11-story constructing and make the overwhelming majority of them dwell in small rooms with out home windows,” the place they’d rely totally on synthetic mild and mechanical air flow.

“When it got here time to really construct it, all of the dorms have been windowless, and [Munger] was like, ‘That is probably the most environment friendly footprint,’” says Rachel O’Toole, Add manufacturing designer, of Munger’s imaginative and prescient.

When creating Add‘s model, she thought of the best way cost-effectiveness already drove the prevailing real-world design alongside the type of constructing materials that might be used 15 years sooner or later, when “we’re going to have an abundance of plastic that we’ve thrown away.” Imagining a future college pupil would work out learn how to add a binder or resin to that plastic, and {that a} contractor would attempt to add a bit of shade, O’Toole got here up with the thought for a gray-pink plastic sludge, which might then be molded or 3D printed.

“It’s 4 or 5 totally different Lego items, that modularly come collectively, and you’ll stack it like Minecraft and construct this complete construction with no home windows,” she explains. “The interiors are a ground with a rest room, kitchen, workspace and simply the identical 6×6 house — and solely six ft tall as a result of that’s environment friendly.”

“It got here out like a porta-potty in my thoughts, the best way one is molded,” she continues, laughing. “In hindsight, it truly seems to be like a very low-cost model of Barbieland as a result of issues are naturally scaled down to scale back the footprint of supplies.”

O’Toole says a part of the method to the housing’s development was about permitting Marshall — who had a “claustrophobic taking pictures” expertise with “the digicam proper on prime of the actors” — the flexibility to seize the human tales alongside the bleaker societal realities confronted by greater than this society’s “destitute.”

“We’ve received this prime shot that goes throughout the models, and you bought to color these little vignettes of all these totally different lives happening, proper on prime of one another,” he says. “The massive level about it was, when you look out for it, in these shared residing locations, we’ve received people who find themselves professionals, folks with their laptop computer open, spreadsheets on the wall. They’re sporting no pants, however sporting a shirt and tie in order that they’ll soar on a Zoom and make it appear to be they’re within the workplace.”

He continued, “That was one thing me and the manufacturing designer talked about lots. We needed to offer the impression that that is everybody — everybody’s in the identical boat sooner or later, and everybody might find yourself in one in every of these grim, miserable locations.”

An identical spacing method was utilized to the Temp Temp Company, which O’Toole says was initially scouted with a extra open location in thoughts. However when the group landed in an deserted workplace with personal dialog cubicles, the plans modified.

“Greg loves tiny areas, and we walked into this one workplace location that had been gutted out of due to the pandemic. Everybody was working from house. All that was left of the folks have been their pc towers sitting on these desks … and these tiny little soundproof cubicles that have been made for when folks have been working within the workplace to have a non-public dialog,” O’Toole recollects. “It instantly clicked to Tom and I — that appears like a temp company. I used to be like, ‘It’s the ‘Temp Temp company.’”

The set-up of the situation mirrors the sensation of a WeWork house, in a scene that options Nathan turning down numerous unimaginable jobs in a commentary concerning the experiences and therapy of undocumented staff. “It developed inside an natural second of understanding the present and the messages that we’re delivering,” she says. “We leaned into the bleakness — the smallness, the tightness of it after which placing one other enterprise subsequent door.”

Whereas the Temp Temp Company and Decreased Circumstance Housing have been each too shut for consolation, Marshall and O’Toole took a much less suffocating method to the decision middle Luke (Kevin Bigley) resorts to working in throughout the Grey Zone. With modifications in coverage to the monetary assist of veterans in Lake View, Luke seems to be to discover a option to pay for his digital afterlife extras which can be off the books resulting from a ban on Lake View’s extra prosperous residents working.

Marshall tells THR that he needed to offer the house extra of a Dune really feel, amid “the grey typography that’s unpurchased on-line actual property,” says O’Toole. The sensation of the house was “limitless and desaturated” in keeping with the director, with the manufacturing designer including she additionally used Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to assist underscore how “usually the locations that we offer for folks inform how you need to really feel or your expectations of what your rights are with out phrases,” she says.

“It’s a commentary on the drudgery of the working class. You need the repetition, you need it to really feel unglamorous, so we constructed all the desks out of cubes in any respect these totally different stations,” she tells THR. “You’re constructing on the thought of minimalism, sci-fi and no shade as a result of they don’t care concerning the staff. They’re making a option to maintain you in that model of 1984 — in your home. This isn’t Google the place you’re meant to really feel shiny, cheery and a part of a group. You’re employed for them.”

Whereas it may appear that Add couldn’t get extra bleak concerning the thought of (co-)residing and dealing areas, it does handle to take a much less existential and extra literal method to the horror of housing in a single episode 4 storyline. Simply in time for Halloween, Nathan’s digital double and Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) make a journey to an deserted a part of Lake View, the place a terrifying model of an AI man with no eyelids is without doubt one of the final remaining remnants.

Marshall says there have been plenty of references the group pulled in for the place he describes as a creepy Beta model of the glitzy golden, shimmering” Lake View viewers know. That features the failed launch of Meta, which O’Toole recollects founder Mark Zuckerberg “pitched as superb, after which it wasn’t.”

“It’s this ghost experience model of [Lake View]. The lights are blinking, and it hasn’t had an replace for a very good few years,” the director says. “Inside it, there are some kind of bizarre, forgotten characters which can be nonetheless roaming the ghostly halls.”

Inside, Marshall took a Resident Evil-style method to filming in an outdated Vancouver mansion O’Toole says was “stripped away of something that required detailed rendering” to offer it the “basic horror, huge, gradual, creepy” feeling of The Shining. As Ingrid and Nathan transfer via the house, doorways open just like the basic horror recreation because the AI Man (Owen Daniels) continuously T-Poses — a name to each the obsessive exercising of the wealthy, tech class and the default pose for a 3D mannequin’s skeleton.

The nefarious motivations of one in every of horror Lake View’s final residents are solely surpassed in comedic terror by his lack of eyelids. “Taking pictures this was arguably one of many funniest scenes I’ve ever shot — this character with no eyelids,” Marshall recollects. “There was this superb second the place we’d been filming on Robbie first, and I might hear the efficiency of this man, after which we turned the digicam round to see the character, and I ruined the take as a result of I laughed out loud.”

Daniels tells THR that the idea of the character comes from a line in Add‘s pilot, with O’Toole including that the look of the character was additionally partly impressed by a member of the VFX group.

“He goes, ‘AI will not be doing palms and eyeballs very effectively,’ and we have been like, ‘Nice.’ (Laughs.) I really like this analog look of a nasty digital illustration,” she says. “It was actually such a enjoyable, enjoyable two episodes as a result of there have been so many worlds inside that you just needed to maintain clear and separate from one another but additionally work cohesively in a present.”