The modern tech company sits at the crossroads of sleek design and trillion-dollar valuations, so a television series looking to realistic skewer the personalities at the center of the industry has to look the part.
For The Audacity, that responsibility fell, in part, to production designer Mark White, who was tasked with creating the tech incubator of sunny Silicon Valley up in the great white north Vancouver, B.C.
White spoke with Gold Derby as a part of our Emmys production design panel and shared with us the secrets of building the massive HQ of Hypergnosis — the start-up in the middle of The Audacity‘s drama — and making sure that its signature slide worked just right, personally.
Gold Derby: What was the initial conversation about what your role on The Audacity was going to entail?
Mark White: Well, the scripts were really strong to begin with, so I had a pretty clear idea of what they were bringing me into. But ultimately, it was telling the story of the world of Silicon Valley and the affluence and the aspirational aspect for some. It’s also morally murky at times, so I was coming in to create that world. We shot in Vancouver, so there was a lot of making Vancouver into California.
These companies that have corollaries in the show, design is a big part of their identity. Were you finding a lot of inspiration out in the wild?
So much. I just took a deep dive into Silicon Valley and all of the early startups, the later startups, and what’s going on currently. There was such a wide range, but like it really was, for me, a lot of learning, I have to say. I looked at a lot of architecture, at a lot of different open-concept offices, collaborative office spaces that they’re doing more often. It’s a lot of research and figuring out the motives of all these companies and how that is incorporated into the look and the design of the spaces.
And suddenly you have to become a designer for workplaces.
Especially huge ones. It wasn’t something I had much experience with. And it’s such a specific world, and it changes constantly. That meant trying to be as current as we could to keep that from dating itself as the show airs.
How were you able to signify that kind of wealth without a tech company’s budget?
We surprisingly built a lot of these sets. There was a lot of control over that. That comes with a lot of extra, just being able to create the world the way you really want to have it, which includes some cheating. We fabricated a lot of the furniture. There was a lot to do with the color palettes and the themes of the different companies. Some of them were based on real companies. Some were completely fictionalized. There’s a lot of glass in the show and this vibe of being viewed and viewing, almost in some cases like being in a gilded cage.
Was there a particular location or set that took up a bit more of your attention than others?
Well, Hypergnosis, the main headquarters, which is a gigantic set. That took the bulk of the time, and we were continually building up until the end of the first block, when we shot it. It was a massive undertaking to get that scale, the height of it, all of it.
Was the slide inside the Hypergnosis headquarters for first professional slide build?
It actually was. It was my first professional slide, which was much more math than I thought would be involved. Getting the angle and the speed right, how fast the actors would go down and how we didn’t want them to go too fast. There was a lot of engineering involved with that. We looked at some store-bought options, but in the end, we decided we should just make it exactly what we wanted, have it fit exactly where we wanted it in the set without any compromising or adjusting to make something pre-fab work.
Was it part of your professional responsibility to test the slide yourself?
Let’s say that I went down a couple of times. Everybody wanted to go down, and until we got it really perfected, we had to wax it so people didn’t go too fast. So there was a lot of testing. It wasn’t just me though.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
This article and video are presented by AMC.
