SUPERNATURAL: Go Behind the Scenes with Production, VFX, Wardrobe and Props

There’s a lot of interesting things to see behind the scenes if you visit the SUPERNATURAL studios. There’s the endless rows of flannel shirts, the gleaming Impala, the cool Men of Letters bunker, the multitude of props and the VFX trailers on the side of the main building.
 
During a recent visit to the set of SUPERNATURAL, we got a behind the scenes look at each of these elements and now you can view them for yourself in the slideshow above and hear a bit of trivia about some of the elements that go into making the show.
 
During our tour, we spoke to Robert Leader (Art Director), Christopher Cooper (Prop Master), Mark Meloche (VFX Supervisor), Jeff Budnick (Picture Car Coordinator), and Kerry Weinrauch (Costume Designer) about all of the different aspects that goes into making the show.
 
New episodes of SUPERNATURAL air on Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

The Men of Letters bunker was inspired by art deco architecture. The set designers also looked at old war bunkers (although this one is far more decorative).

Originally this piece was made of real circuit boards, but as they kept the set they decided to build their own version so they didn’t have to keep renting the real one.

There’s little details sprinkled throughout the bunker, including sigils on the floors and walls.

There’s even sigils on the phone….

This is actually a map of the First Nations reservations in the United States.

Beer hiding in the mini fridge in the bunker — definitely a Sam and Dean addition.

There’s also signals in the light fixtures…

Production has a book with blueprints of a lot of old sets (and the new ones), including Bobby’s house, in case they ever need to bring old sets back.

Production also has a reference book of symbols and sigils used throughout the show, detailing the look, dimensions, color and placement on floors, walls or ceilings when used.

The ceiling over the “command center” portion of the bunker has room for lights and wiring.

The fridge in the Men of Letter’s kitchen is quite sparse.

One of the standing hallways leading from the kitchen to the bedroom.

Sam and Dean’s room is the same set, although it’s “dressed” differently for each Winchester. Dean’s room was set up this year (we got to see Sam’s room last year) and he stays in room 15 — the kitchen is room 23.

Beer bottles litter almost every surface of Dean’s room, from the little corner table to the shelf over his bed to the desk. Keep an eye out in the next few photos for them.

It looks like Dean is taking his daily vitamins….

John’s journal in the prop room.

A few angel blades.

Early season photos of Mary and John Winchester adorn the shelves in the props room.

This flogger was used by Magda in episode 12.04 “American Nightmare”

The props room contains a Sam Funko doll (used in episode 11.10) and the little Castiel doll from the season 5 episode “I Believe the Children Are Our Future”.

The tightest timeline they’ve had for a prop was the angel killing sword in terms of reading the script, coming up with the design and having it built by their sword maker. He basically hand built it from scratch.

Mr. Ketch rode in to SUPERNATURAL wearing this helmet at the end of episode 12.04 — and this is the rat poison the mother used to kill her husband in the same episode.

Some cool looking books in the prop room.

The creepy doll from episode 12.03 “The Foundry”.

The Colt — all of the Colt’s bullets are numbered and they have “Winchester” stamped on them.

They never mess up the “hero” car (ie. the prettiest version of the Impala they have), says Jeff. They bought this main car in season 4 with 12,000 miles and now it only has about 17,000 miles. It used to be blue with blue interior, but they made it all black. There are plenty of other Impalas to use for stunts.

The trunk of the car was empty when we visited the set. All of the pieces inside are typically stored in boxes in the prop room.

This is one of two lock ups for the wardrobe department (and this one alone is big). In the warehouse off-site, they store a lot of the uniforms or children’s clothes or the types of clothes they don’t use on a continual basis — like any period costumes.
 
Kerry said that her department likes to have fun and push boundaries whenever they can. For example, the imaginary friends episode last season allowed them to take the costumes a bit further than normal. But in something like the wrestling episode they can only take things so far before people start looking like cartoon characters.

One of the most difficult aspects of dressing a large group of people in a show such as this is ensuring that you don’t have everyone in the same color. According to Kerry “everybody seems to eat up the blue and the green really quickly”.

Along one wall of the warehouse lies boxes and boxes of shoes and hats worn by the various characters.

The wardrobe department keeps all of Sam’s and Dean’s clothes up in the front by their offices because they access them the most. A few of the brothers’ clothes from past episodes/seasons are considered outdated or retired after a suitable period of time. Every year they “tend to try and get the brothers a new batch of jackets and shirts and things like that. And update jeans just because they start off with 8 or 9 of one thing and then there’s only 3 left”, Kerry said. They’ll have to retire those clothes in the future as well if they run through them because they need multiples of each piece of clothing for all of the stunts.

The buyers get a lot of the flannel shirts at Levi’s or Mark’s Work Warehouse. They dress Dean in more solid colors and strive not to have the brothers wear the same types of patterns. Sam, meanwhile, wears more cowboy type shirts. The buyers will purchase about 7-9 of the same shirt in a few different sizes when they go shopping. They often find the perfect shirt but can’t buy multiple pieces as they may not be available. There are a few shirts where they have only 1-2 copies, so they appear in quick little scenes where they are less likely to be damaged in some way.

Rowena, sadly, has given up the ballgown look in season 12. Kerry fought to have Rowena keep her look because it’s such a strange and quirky characteristic, but Rowena is embracing more modern things this season. The wardrobe department is, however, trying to keep as many elements of her old look as possible and are trying to incorporate clothes that are long and flowing. The one good thing about the lack of ballgowns, however, is that it’s easier to do stunts in normal clothes.

Meloche in the VFX department tends to leave scenes up to the director so that the director can turn their vision into reality. But there are times when he has to suggest doing things a certain way for the sake of VFX. For example, while a lot of shows/films will leave the camera static (ie. standing in place) during a VFX shot, SUPERNATURAL will never do this. That’s one of the things that he mandated because a “static VFX shot bugs [him] because it doesn’t usually fit in with the flow of the show”.

When they aged up Amara they had the older actress come in and they made her lie in the same position as the baby and then lined up her eyes with the baby’s eyes and did a transition between the two.

The banshee is Mark Meloche’s favorite monster as it was a “total collaboration between prosthetics, special effects, visual effects [and] electrics.” The banshee was scripted as having long, straight black hair. But the director (John Badhman) wanted her floating. So when the floating idea came up Meloche said if she was going to be floating they should do an “anti-gravity, underwater look” for the hair. There is also a light in the actress’ mouth — it’s a modified LED rave insert.

The power plant that sits above the Men of Letters bunker in the show doesn’t actually exist. The setting is underneath a bridge in Vancouver and the VFX team digitally removed the bridge and replaced it with a building. The door, however, is entirely real and it’s underneath the bridge.

You’re seeing Florence through the window in the background here in episode 10.16 “Paint It Black”. The VFX team went into Google Maps and took a typology map of the city and then created a 3D environment. This is actually the view that you would see from this building if you were in Florence — it’s geographically correct — but it’s all computer generated in the background.

Digital makeup is a technique that the VFX team has “pushed to the max”. In the case of the veins on Sam’s face in episode 11.02 “Form and Void”, this is all full digital face makeup that was tacked on to the actor. This is something the VFX team is called on to do constantly.

In the season 11 episode “Love Hurts”, we saw a man’s shadow transform into a woman’s shadow behind a window. Meloche explained that they achieved this effect by using “plates”. On the day of filming they had the actor stand in position behind the window and marked his spot on the floor. Then they had the actress come in and stand on the same spot and film her. Then they cleared the window and Meloche’s team took a shot of just the empty window. The transformation shot is later achieved through VFX software.

The VFX crew on SUPERNATURAL (and on other shows and movies) will often use stock footage of a certain building instead of picking up production to go to that location. In the case of this building which appeared in the season 11 episode “The Vessel”, the exterior is stock footage purchased from a footage bank. Then the VFX team added in the banners, the old car and changed the color of the sky.

In episode 10.10 Dean — under the influence of the Mark of Cain — tortured Metatron and cut into his chest with an angel blade. You can see Metatron’s grace glowing through the wound so you probably already assumed that this shot was done by VFX. But you probably didn’t know that the wound in the right photo was on Curtis Armstrong the entire time, as it was going to appear throughout the rest of the scene. It’s done with makeup. The VFX team digitally erased the wound and then revealed it inch by inch as the blade was moving down his chest.