Technodolly and the Art of Authentic Cloning in Orphan Black

When John Fawcett first conceived of ​Orphan Black, he didn't realize it was a show about clones. All he saw in his mind was the opening scene.

"A girl gets off the train, looks across the tracks, and she sees her doppleganger," said the director on the phone from his home in Toronto, narrating what would become the beginning of the hugely popular sci-fi show that's now starting its third season. "They make eye contact, and in that moment, the other one steps off the platform and into the path of an oncoming train."

At first, Fawcett didn't actually want to make a show about clones. "Clones are stupid," he remembered thinking. "How many good clone movies have you seen? Multiplicity?" But as he and co-creator Graeme Manson unspooled the idea, they realized that clones stories had become so hackneyed, there was space to do something fresh and different.

Fawcett didn't want to do what he calls the room-of-a-thousand-drawers cliché; a character opens a drawer and find another version of herself in it—and then another, and another. To Fawcett, that's just boring.

Ironically, he realized that the best way to make clones interesting would be to make them normal. "What if you were walking around on the planet and you didn't know you were a clone?" he asked. The clones in Orphan Black aren't exactly average—a little DIY scarification, anyone?—but, until Tatiana Maslany's various characters start running into each other, they're just doing their thing like everyone else.

When it came to designing the show, Fawcett wanted it to not only feel normal, but to look normal too. "What's important to me is that the shots look like any other shot that you'd see in a TV series," he said.

This posed a problem. How would they shoot the clone scenes so they wouldn't look like they were made on a computer? "I don't want to feel like I'm watching visual effects. Those things stand out like a sore thumb," he said. "I needed to find a way to create this landscape or fabric of the show that really made us believe in the authenticity of cloning."

In order to make a really authentic-looking show about clones, Fawcett felt like he couldn't rely on the usual tricks. For example, a common technique is what's called a static shot. A director frames the scene and locks it off so that neither the camera nor the objects on set move at all—as Fawcett says, if an actor doesn't move it, then it's glued down. Then the director simply does two passes, with the actor playing a different character each time.

In order to shoot the kinds of natural scenes he wanted, Fawcett needed a way to do a locked-off shot and still have the ability to move the camera around the actors. It seemed like a contradiction. But a solution came from a company in the Czech Republic called Technocrane s.r.o., which makes telescoping camera cranes, and for the purposes of Orphan Black, the motion-control Technodolly.

The Technodolly is a programmable camera crane on a track that lets the camera operator shoot manually, moving the camera anywhere within a space that's 25 feet wide and 80 feet long. Once Fawcett and his team determine they've got the shot they want, then it's simply a matter of pushing a button, and the camera repeats all those movements exactly.

It used to be that if you want to do a motion control shot, you would need to program every move ahead of time. "If you watch something that's just been created out of a computer, it can be very robotic-looking," said Fawcett. "When you're operating a camera manually, there are all these spontaneous moves and little imperfections in the camerawork that make it feel real."

There's a scene at the end of season two, for example, where four clones are dancing together in a room. Maslany starts as one clone character, and they'll rehearse the scene with acting doubles playing each of the other clones. Fawcett and his team work it over with the actors until they find a rhythm for the shot that they like, and that becomes the master template. Then they simply build the scene up in layers, only instead of doubles, Maslany acts the scene out with tennis balls where her clones will be. (Tennis balls are easily scrubbed in the editing room, and they ensure that Maslany is looking where she needs to, and not vaguely into the distance.)

Getting it perfect is a painstaking process. Every glance and gaze that the clones exchange needs to match up perfectly, and one character might need to shift slightly at a very specific moment to match the movement of another character. Even half a second off can make the scene look fake. "Those are the specific timing things that you have to make sure are happening," said Fawcett. "It's not uncommon to shoot ten takes to make sure all those things match up."

Orphan Black's clone scenes might look as natural as any other show on television, but with all the rehearsing and costume changes, they take a lot longer to shoot. "This is not the kind of thing that you ever have the budget for on most television series," Fawcett said, admitting that an episode often takes several days longer to shoot than your typical show.

The new season of Orphan Black includes a whole new line of clones, played by Ari Millen. "Back in season one, we were all figuring out how to do it, but the nice thing going into season three, we all feel like pros," said Fawcett. "It was kind of fun taking the new guy and showing him the way. It was like frosh week."

If Fawcett was once bored by clones, he doesn't feel like that anymore. "I'm constantly asking myself, what could I do that I haven't seen before?" he said. But he isn't giving away any spoilers. "All I can say is that the visual treats to come are even tastier than they've been so far."​

Orphan Black returns April 18th 9e/10p on Space. Catch up now.