Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Atlantis (Stargate)" in English language version.
This is the first time we see any of the Lost City of Atlantis, and it is, in fact, an outpost or part of the city itself. I had to keep in mind that if the Atlantis series were to become a reality then its standing sets would in some way have to tie-in with those we establish in Lost City. I wanted to come up with a motif or design for this world that was not only interesting to look at but also adaptable. So for instance, there would be one main space that was a cathedral-like room with alcoves, and then other smaller areas that could serve as a lab, corridors or anything else necessary. Of course, with all these spaces you need instruments, places to sit, etc, and as we're in an alien environment everything has to look alien. It has to make sense in its own world, too. Although our outpost set is inside an ice cave it's not a crystal cave. So I went on the Internet and began looking at crystalline structures and came across electron-microscopic images of snowflakes. Oddly enough, they looked more like spaceships rather than snowflakes and I thought, 'Hey, that's cool'. Also, even though they're organic shapes that occur in Nature they have an architecture-like appearance as well. We took those elements and incorporated them into the look of our set. This process could then be carried through when designing the Atlantis sets.
When it came to the look of the set, the producers wanted it to be distinctly different from the one on Stargate. That wasn't difficult to do. We basically just went in the opposite direction. The Stargate Command facility is dark and claustrophobic, whereas our base on Atlantis has plenty of light and windows and is very open and airy. The Atlantis set is also bigger. Its Stargate is set on the diagonal of the studio, so the distance between the gate and the control room is actually further.
The Atlantis gate room set is especially impressive. It had to be big and have plenty of scope. The beauty of this gate room, which was part of the basic concept for the series, is that in the show it was built as a base for Space exploration. That's why it has the puddle-jumpers and everything else that goes along with it. It's a place used to explore the Pegasus galaxy. There's a great deal of fun in that, and therefore fun in the design of the sets as well.
I used [architect] Frank Lloyd Wright as my inspiration. He designed, among countless other things, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which is based on a 30-60-90 triangle. Our set was constructed using a similar type of geometry. The lower gallery is made up of equilateral triangles in order that flat surfaces can be shifted around to create different spaces and shapes. So most of the walls are at 30 degree angles or some variation of that, and anything circular is, in fact, some sort of machinery. For example, the Stargate is round and so is the Atlantis conference room, which also serves as a VR [visual reality] room.
First stop on the tour is a visit to the main Stargate: Atlantis set, housed in Stage six. The show's standing set is comprised of a magnificent, split level interior, housing the stargate, those huge stairs, the balcony on which stand the gate's control panels, and Weir's office. Below, adjacent and on a slightly lower level to the floor on which stands the Stargate, is an extra room used for shooting a variety of scenes.
We got the go-ahead for the series around mid-November [2003]. The following day, the production design team began working on ideas for the standing sets. Brad and I were actually approving the building of the sets while we were writing the script. No one had even seen a script when they were designing the interior set for the city, which is the central feature of the TV show. The city of Atlantis itself is built as a CGI model and 10 times the size of anything they've ever built at Rainmaker, which is one of the bigger VFX companies here in Vancouver.
Designing the main standing set for Atlantis came up very quickly. Everyone was on hiatus last November when we all received phone calls asking us to come into the office for a meeting the following morning. The day after that we started working on our designs. Construction began about three weeks later and the set was finished by the beginning of February.
We call the central area where the gate is the Gatetrium. If you walk up the main set of stairs you arrive at a landing. To the left is the conference room and to the right is the control room. Behind the tall stained glass window of the landing is an exterior balcony that supposedly overlooks the ocean surrounding Atlantis. If you walk out of the control room and across an overhead bridge you'll end up in a small space that serves as Dr Weir's [Torri Higginson] office. Heading back downstairs, if you stand with your back to the gate there's a ramp on the left and one to the right. They come together to form what's known as the lower gallery. That space is used as a swing set. The walls can be moved around to create an infirmary, a lab, someone's living quarters, whatever we need for the particular episode being shot.
I was brought into work with the 3D artists and devise a layout for the city. Brad Wright and Robert Cooper had given us tons of visual reference about what the general shape of the City was to be and how they wanted the overall structure to look, but they pretty much left everything else to us. They had very specific ideas about the history and the backstory, how the technology worked and how the various sections interacted, but I got the impression from them that they really enjoy watching the ideas evolve visually. They gave us a lot of room to experiment.
Part of the reference was electron microscope images of snowflakes, which I think Brad Wright was taken with. Robert Cooper is also a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright and his style of modernist architecture. We would talk about how they wanted the city to work structurally. Then I would go away and come up with some different ideas and very rough pencil sketches. We'd discuss those again and I would produce some colour artwork that the 3D artists would use as a general reference to help them as they were building the city. I work with 3D quite a bit when I developing concept ideas - it's just so much faster than drawing. Usually I'll build a scene with very basic primitive shapes, just to get the composition and perspective right. Then I'll paint over the render in Photoshop, adding all the ambient lighting and details.
