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Taken
- Production notes
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Over
the past 50 years, there have been numerous accounts of visitors
from outer space abducting humans.
The
subject has inspired books, magazines, films television and radio
shows and websites, all devoted to the study and exploration of
the experiences of those who say they have been taken.
None
of these, however, have offered the epic scale and compelling narrative
of Steven Spielberg's Taken, an unprecedented series produced by
DreamWorks.
As
it traces the lives of three families, each intimately connected
with the alien abduction phenomenon over the course of more than
50 years, Taken combines a half century of alien mythology with
stories of the ordinary and extraordinary people on the front lines
of man's contact with other worlds.
Created
by Steven Spielberg, Taken is a very ambitious and visionary project.
"I've
always been interested in the genre and thought I couldn't acquit
this genre in a two hour or two and fifteen minute long movie,"
said Spielberg.
"We
would all need a lot more patience and a lot more time to really
do the history of alien abductions starting back in 1947 right to
today which is what Taken is about - the history of alien abductions."
Spielberg
approached screenwriter Leslie Bohem (Dante's Peak, 20 Bucks) to
develop the idea of a mini-series on alien abductions into a script.
"We
started to talk about what we could do," says Leslie, who also
served as executive producer on the project.
"We
knew we wanted it to be about the mythology, the lore. We knew we
wanted it to be as true to that as we could, to hit all the signposts
of the modern UFO phenomena.
"From
there, I just started to come up with stories. These are stories
about incredible things that happen to ordinary people.
"From
a storytelling point of view, those are the most interesting stories
to tell."
The
stories revolve around three families. First there are the Keys,
who become the unwilling victims of numerous alien abductions and
mysterious experimentation.
The
Clarkes are a very close family whose extreme loyalty protects the
fact that several of their members are partially alien.
 Finally,
the Crawfords are an ambitious and ruthless family determined to
discover the secrets behind a downed spacecraft.
Captain
Owen Crawford will stop at nothing - even kidnap or murder - to
advance his career in the military.
Each
family plays an important role in the story Spielberg and Bohem
want to tell.
"I
always knew that there would be three points of view," Leslie
says.
"I
wanted to look at an ordinary family, like the Keys, whose lives
are ripped apart by this.
"The
Clarkes, specifically Tom Clarke, came about, in part, because I
was fascinated by debunkers and I've never really seen much about
debunkers.
"And
I was interested in including an off-centered look at what might
be going on inside the government, which I got with the Crawfords.
"Because
it is a mini-series, it's going to be 100% character driven,"
added Spielberg.
"I
believe what will keep people tuned in hopefully is that the characters
are very compelling and you watch these characters evolve and age
before your eyes and give birth to special children who themselves
have a purpose in our story."
Connecting
those three families - and the aliens - together was the idea that
alien abductions were part of an evolutionary experiment, an idea
that Leslie only reveals in the later stages of Taken.
While
Taken carefully documents the cultural and social changes that take
place in the human world, one thing remains constant through the
ten episodes: the alien visitors, who are seen in both alien and
human form, and their remarkable spaceships, which appear as both
glowing orbs and as mechanical crafts.
"The
design process for the ship was interesting," says Chris Gorak,
Production Designer.
"The
story is that the aliens come in a ball of light energy, but there's
also a crashed UFO, so we had to come up with a way to look at the
ship changing from one form to the other.
"Our
first pass was very organic-looking but after discussions with Steven
Spielberg he steered us towards a more mechanical model that was
rooted in technology that the audience could understand.
"Since
we start the story in 1947, we ended up bringing in design concepts
from the present day – industrial design, architectural design,
automotive design - and using them in such a way that they felt
like they were from another world."
Chris
also drew on the mythology to create the relic that Owen Crawford
found at Roswell and that comes to life in later episodes.
"In
the mythology, they said they found a piece of the craft after the
Roswell crash," says Chris.
"In
history, it was a little piece of a steel I-beam, but we took that
idea and gave it a twist, gave it our own look in such a way that
it would still be true to the lore. At
first it was just static and then we went through several renditions,
finally creating something that comes to life, that glows and has
script scrolling back and forth over it. In the end, it had a sort
of religious quality to it."
The
challenge of creating believable alien characters fell to co-producer
and visual effects supervisor Jim Lima (The Others, Strange Days).
Rather
than use animatronics or other mechanical means, Lima built a 3-D
model of an alien then scanned it into the computer to create a
digital alien that could be inserted into scenes.
"If
Jurassic Park forever changed the way we perceive dinosaurs, then
Taken was going to forever change the way we perceive UFO mythology
and aliens," says Jim.
"I
had very extensive meetings with Steven Spielberg about the aliens,
discussing the lore and the mythology and the accounts of people
who have reported to have seen aliens," he added.
"Steven
has an amazing knowledge in this area, because when he did Close
Encounters, he went and interviewed these people and had heard these
things first-hand."
Given
the basic parameters of the creature - four feet tall, grey skin,
thin with long necks, arms and fingers, huge almond-shaped eyes
set in oversized head - Jim set about trying to bring them to life.
"I
started out with a sort of traditional artistic approach, but I
realised that to get this to the next level, I had to do what palaeontologists
do with dinosaurs or early man: start from the bones and build it
up from there," he says.
"I
started working very photo-realistically, scanning different types
of skin textures, taking pictures of different types of creatures,
from older people to sea lions and dolphins.
"The
alien eyes are actually my wife's eyes, stretched out and enlarged.
The skin is a collage of photo-realistic images, taken from living
things, which gives us that moistness and depth of personality and
aliveness we were looking for."
Jim
also took the unusual step of building his own visual effect unit
for Taken, rather than sending the work out to visual effects houses.
It's
an approach he pioneered in 1992, while working with Steven Spielberg
on Seaquest DSV and used again on Spielberg's NBC series The Others.
"Normally
on a project like this, you'd hire one of the visual effects houses
to do the work," says Jim.
"But
back in 1992, we were faced with the problem that, given what the
effects houses were charging, we would only be able to afford about
three visual effects per episode on a show that everyone expected
to be spectacular.
"So
we built a unit - bought the equipment, hired the animators - and
it was very successful. We did it again on The Others and when I
took the reel around town, people thought it was for a feature film."
Having
an in-house visual effects unit allowed Jim to do things other series
only dream about and to do it at a cost that allows liberal use
of visual effects.
On
average, each episode of Taken contains 80 visual effects, about
twice as many as on a sci-fi show like The X-Files or Dark Angel.
"We
are able, just for example, to do the kind of miniature shooting
that you would do on a $80 million feature film," he says.
"This is something you just don't see on television."
Having
the unit in-house also allows the crew to avail itself of Spielberg's
extensive knowledge and expertise.
"Because
we're only working on Taken and because we have people who are here
because they want to work for Steven, we can be committed to giving
him exactly what he wants," says Jim.
"During
production, we sent out tapes every week and Steven was always copied
on those tapes and when his comments came back, they were always
spot on.
"We
are so fortunate to be working for the absolute master of science
fiction. This is probably not unlike what people must have felt
like when they worked for Cecile B. de Mille."
For
Leslie Bohem, who in collaboration with Spielberg, took the idea
from a concept to words on the page and marvelled as those words
came to life, Taken is already a success.
"It
has exceeded all my expectations," he says. "You forget
when you're in the middle of it just how really, really ambitious
this project is.
"It's
stunning to me to see what these guys - and I mean them, not me
- have pulled off. It looks great. It's moving. They did it."
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Spielberg - Biography
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