SUPERNATURAL: Behind the Scenes With Set Design and the Impala

For the last several years we’ve had an opportunity to visit the SUPERNATURAL set in Vancouver and a highlight of our trip is a chance to take a behind the scenes tour with various members of the production crew to learn more about the design of the sets and how they take care of the signature Impala.

This year we had an opportunity to tour the Men of Letters bunker, the alternate dimension’s burned-out church where Michael seems to enjoy torturing people, and a motel that will appear in an upcoming episode of the show. In addition, we saw the Impala and learned more about how the show uses movie magic to tricks fans into thinking the Winchester brothers are driving down various streets.

During our interviews with the crew, we gleaned some behind the scenes tidbits to share with fans. Browse through our photos above to learn them all.

SUPERNATURAL airs Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

According to Production Designer Jerry Wanek, this church in the alternate dimension was originally “written as just another concrete bunker and I hate that, so it gives me the sort of creative license to take the story a little further and that’s what we did.” This church will appear in several episodes, having first been seen in episode 13.07 when Michael was torturing Lucifer. We’ve seen from a preview for the midseason finale that Mary will also be held here.

Wanek enjoyed creating a large church steeple where the Iron Maiden took the place of a bell, because “there’s some swing to it”. It was originally just written as a “cage off the ground and this is what we came up with.” The size of the Iron Maiden device is also “adjustable”, depending on the size of the actor inside it.

There’s a lot of space between the boards of the various walls in the church, but when you add in atmosphere and light you get really cool shafts of light, called “God rays”. All of this was purposeful when the crew was designing the place.

This shot shows the level of detail that goes into the sets, from the coloring of the alter to burning the wax of the candles to make the scenes look more authentic.

Wanek explained that they’re lucky on SUPERNATURAL because the production crew has a lot of freedom “to take [the sets] to a place where we think is appropriate, as opposed to just being dictated [to].”

A beautiful fresco painting near the altar of the church.

A door on the inside of the church leads to a room off to the side of the building.

These spikes are seen sticking out of the ground in the alternate dimension that Mary and Lucifer were trapped in at the beginning of season 13. Wanek told us that they were modeled to look like the a familiar weapon on the show. “They’re the same exact shape and dimension as an angel blade.” Some of the ones on location were even 20 feet tall.

The Men of Letters bunker is one of the show’s few standing sets and has been in use on SUPERNATURAL since season 8. It’s served as a base of operations for the Winchester brothers, who spent most of the early years in motels or at Bobby Singer’s house.

When the bunker was first mentioned in a season 8 script, it was originally described as a “concrete bunker, a la Hitler’s bunker,” Wanek explained. “And we quickly dismissed that because it would have been very boring after two episodes [when] looking at concrete walls. What we did was we extrapolated the Men of Letters’ whole ethos from the Freemasons. So these guys were leaders of industry and they had means and they were all from different walks of life — some were scientists, some were chemists, some were business people. But they were all learned people. And during the time when we said the Men of Letters moved to the United States was basically during the late ’30s in the Depression. And there was this movement in the United States called the WPA movement where they built these beautiful art deco structures to keep people in work.” A lot of these buildings are still standing, including power stations and libraries.

Wanek’s theory was “in order to power this [bunker], we needed to have a power source. So the first time we introduced this there was a CGI of a art deco power station up on the hill and the door into this place was down below. So that’s why there’s power.”

Almost everything structural in the bunker is made of foam, including the walls, so they can be easily moved to accommodate the shots needed. All of the bookcases are on wheels and move as well so the cameras can get behind them, especially for long shots. That is “something you have to think of when you’re [building sets] because every director wants to shoot [the bunker] in a way that nobody else has shot it. That just goes with the territory of being a director.”

A few little details in the bunker — including labels on the file folders in the library room.

Sadly, the majority of the books in the bunker library room are fake, although a lot of work has gone into making sure they’re all very distinctive-looking.

Sam and Dean Winchester left their mark on a table in the bunker back in season 12 and the marks remain there to this day.

There’s a lot of different symbols buried in the decorations of the walls, the light panels, and even on the floor, which are supposed to serve as warding symbols.

Sam and Dean brought a modern coffee maker to the bunker’s kitchen.

The Winchester brothers have left up the lists and signs the Men of Letters used in the kitchen.

The back of the fridge in the bunker kitchen comes off, which allows the crew to film from the inside of the fridge outwards. They use this technique in a lot of different episodes, including looking out from the inside of medicine cabinets, for example.

Welcome to Sam Winchester’s room. Sam and Dean’s room is actually the same room on set, but they dress it up differently depending on which room they’re filming in that day.

The bunker was meant to have “dorm-style” bedrooms and that utilitarian look remains, although the brothers have occasionally added their own touch to their rooms. Including, in this case, beer bottles.

The Del Ray Motel set will appear in an upcoming episode of SUPERNATURAL.

For this motel room they wanted to do a design that was “mid-century. Then we started looking for things [that fit the motif].” They started looking through wallpaper books and settled on the paper here, and settled on a graphic print for the floors.

Wanek had built well over 150 motel sets in the earlier years of the show before the bunker was introduced because SUPERNATURAL was really a “road show”.

They make the rooms a bit bigger than normal motel rooms to allow for the cameras and also for fight sequences.

A cool retro looking clock is on the wall of the Del Ray Motel.

In the early years of the show, Warner Brothers had the idea to make a deal with Motel 6 and to feature those rooms in the show, but Wanek wasn’t a fan of that idea. He believed that the only way to show the region where the brothers were traveling to was to “put something in the motel that shows [the fans] you’re in, you know, Louisiana. [Or] you’re in Arizona.”

Jerry Wanek peeks at us from behind the motel screen.

The show used to do a lot of iconic and funny looking screens in their motel rooms, particularly in the early years. The screens are also “a great way to introduce something because you can shoot through them. So it’s a great way to establish what the room looks like.”

Severalof the more distinctive screens have made their way to the art department’s offices where they are used as dividers between the desks.

These cells in Asmodeus’ lair are where Lucifer and Castiel are currently being held captive.

Part of the hallway outside Asmodeus’ lair.

“When you see our guys driving down the road at night, they’re right here. Every single time. This is called the ‘Poor Man’s Process’,” Wanek told us. “Our director of photograph Serge [Ladouceur] has developed this system along with our grips and our lighting [crew] to make these lights flash and pass [the car]. They rock the car and spray a little mist on the wind-screen depending on what the weather was like outside when they shot. This is called the PMP and we use it all the time. I think we do it better than anybody, because I watch the show [and] I know it’s right here and I still buy into it that we’re on the road.”

While the PMP technique works well for night-shoots, the show doesn’t really utilize it for daytime scenes. Some shows do a rear-screen projection technique, where they go out with a van that has cameras all around it, and it shoots a 360 degree view going down a highway, for example. Then they put up screens all around the car and then all the scenes are pieced together on the screen. But Wanek claims that the technique isn’t as effective and doesn’t look as real, so they tend to stay away from doing that. Instead, SUPERNATURAL uses a car with an arm and a camera on it that follows or drives around the Impala, which allows the crew to shoot close-ups and distance shots.

SUPERNATURAL films very few scenes of the car driving down the road for each episode. Wanek said “we had a unit that went out and shot a bunch of [scenes] for like a week. And Phil Sgriccia, one of our producers/directors, took a separate unit and went on all these back roads and did a bunch of stuff with the car passing, at night [and] day, pulling into seedy motels, all this other stuff. So now that is our stock footage. So we implement that every time we can. Because it takes a lot to set up a car driving shot. So by building up this library, we use it until people get sick of it and [then] we do another unit [of shooting].”

This car is “Hero #3” (with the first and second cars being on set the day we visited). Picture Car Coordinator Jeff Budnick is in charge of looking after all of the Impalas on set. SUPERNATURAL has nine of its signature car in total — three “Hero” cars, three stunt cars,a few versions that are wrecked, and a cut-up car. The cup-up car is basically a shell of a car and the roof and doors are all able to come off easily so they “can get different angles” when filming.

Hero #1 has a “big block motor in it, a 502”, while the rest of them have “small block” motors. For example, Hero #3 is not a high-performance car, but it runs fine.

Three of the cars have the rearview mirrors on magnets so they can easily come off for shooting. Some of the windshields are also clear, while others have a blue-tinted band to them. They try to use the clear windshields for the “PMP shots”. Some cars also have tinted glass and those are primarily used when they have a double driving the car at night so that the identity of the driver is less noticeable.

Budnick thinks that SUPERNATURAL’s early years of utilizing the PMP technique looked a bit fake, but that the show has come a long way in achieving a far more natural look over the years.

Fans all over the world are building the cars — as far away as Brazil and Sweden, according to Budnick. Fans even contact Budnick to find out “what color I use for this [piece], or stuff like that”. But the interest in the car has made it a bit difficult to find parts, and the parts that Budnick and other fans find are much more expensive than they were when SUPERNATURAL began. “You can’t find a rusted-out basket case for under $10,000 now”, when the car used to be worth $2,500. But apparently car manufacturers are making more reproduction parts for the Impala now because the interest in the model has grown with the show, and so that is making things a bit easier for Budnick.

Back in the very early seasons of the show, the Impala used to have the “spotlights” that you can see on the side of the windshield here. But they were “taken off because the director/producer at the time, Kim Manners, [said] they were always in the way of the camera. So they were always moving them out of the way. One day he goes ‘just take them off’. So I did,” Budnick said. “And then the fans went crazy. It really showed you how passionate the fans were about the car.”

Another reason they picked the Impala (other than creator Eric Kripke’s oft-quoted desire for a cool car with a big trunk), is the fact that the cameras in the earlier years used to be very big. And so production wanted a big “four-door sedan to get in and out of.” Now they have smaller HD cameras and don’t need such a large car, and yet the car has become iconic.

Behind the scenes tidbit: apparently “Jared [Padalecki]’s hit a few things over the years” when driving the car.