Ridley Scott, everyone’s favourite grumpy old guy filmmaker, prefers to create exotic worlds by shooting in real-world locales as much as possible, even in the era of CGI and StageCraft sets. In order to create the extraterrestrial settings for his “Alien” feature prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” he shot in Iceland and New Zealand. He also used Jordan’s Wadi Rum (also known as the Valley of the Moon) to create the Martian landscapes in “The Martian.” The sci-fi series “Raised by Wolves,” which is produced by Scott and was written by “Prisoners” screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski, likewise heavily relies on on-location photography. It frequently feels like a spiritual continuation of the concepts and ideas in “Prometheus” and “Covenant.”
Along with producing, Scott also served as the show’s director for the first two episodes. He collaborated with veteran cinematographer Dariusz Wolski to create the aesthetic for Keppler-22b, a real planet 600 light-years from Earth. The series is set in a future in which two rival groups of humanity—Mithraics, who revere the god Sol, and atheists—have destroyed their homeworld. A pair of androids known as Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) are dispatched to care for a group of human children on Keppler-22b and raise them as atheists in an effort to offer humankind a new beginning. That’s easier said than done, though, as the planet is home to a wide variety of poisonous flora and hazardous animals that appear to be actively working to wipe off humanity.
Keppler-22b is a terrible planet, but it’s also rather lovely, with lush rainforests in its Tropical Zone and stunning mountains that constantly appear to have a coating of clouds rolling over them. Guzikowski told Deadlinein October 2020, “What’s so fantastic is that Ridley wants to do a lot of stuff literally, and so we had a lot of genuine settings,” adding that the clouds obscuring the mountains “happened every morning really naturally” close to Cape Town, South Africa. After Scott assisted in scouting out the area, scenes depicting Mother and Father’s base camp in season 1 were filmed here.
‘These are things that you recognize, but you don’t’
Chris Seagers, the production designer for “Raised by Wolves,” told the tale of how he and Scott (who had only previously met once) discovered the ideal location to create the “desert terrain” when Mother and Father arrive on Keppler-22b in season 1. According to what he said, the two and their colleagues searched in the area of Cape Town for 45 minutes before discovering an abandoned vineyard halfway up a neighbouring mountain. Three days later, they took a flight to the vineyard to conduct further research. Seagers recalled that as soon as they started looking at things, “off he goes” and “suddenly Ridley started drawing out what he’d observed, how he wanted it to operate.”
According to visual effects supervisor Raymond McIntyre Jr., “Ridley comes from an era in the 1980s when you couldn’t do as many things with visual effects as you can today, so coming up with imaginative concepts of how to do things in-camera was incredibly crucial.” Naturally, “Raised by Wolves” still required a significant amount of CGI to improve the images showing the less-than-alien-looking surroundings of the vineyard. According to McIntyre Jr., season 1 alone included 3,700 VFX shots, and season 2’s tally was undoubtedly significantly higher (where the show moves to the Tropical Zone). Remember that there were ten episodes total, lasting between 40 and 60 minutes each. For the purpose of comparison, WIRED noted that “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” features 1,600 VFX shots and is 134 minutes long.
Guzikowski told Best that the show’s shooting locations are crucial to portraying Keppler-22b the way he and Scott wanted it to be—a place that appears to be hospitable to humans but is definitely not of our world and possibly much more threatening than you’d think—in addition to reducing the amount of necessary VFX, “which are time-consuming and expensive”:
“You’re still creating visually stunning stuff that feels alien, things on Earth that tickle something in our deep genetics that feel extraterrestrial. These are things that you recognize, but you don’t, and I think that’s the sweet spot.”