How has the Buffy studio grown over the years?
There’s a series of three stages here, three warehouses I should say and we have a lot of footage. I think we’ve got something like 44,000 square feet but when we started we only had one third of this.
We originally built part of the high school, the Bronze and the Master’s lair. So, everything else was on location and being a vampire show it was all night in the cemetery until dawn. We were night after night until six in the morning; it was really horrible.
We were picked up originally for 12 shows, which was a short season. Then when the show went on and was successful, they brought it back. At that point Joss wanted to make his life a little easier and not spend all night in cemeteries, so we took the area around about and we made this street (Sunnydale High Street), we made the alleyway down there outside the Bronze and then we took half the car park and made it into a cemetery. So, most of the work we do these days is actually done right here.
Then we expanded, took over the other two warehouses so now we have a pretty big area. 44,000 square feet is a lot of footage. Every time we re-work the street, we re-work the alleyway. We change things. We change the cemetery and we still go out on location a certain amount, probably two days an episode, but not the six days like it used to be.
