So today, we've been in the wonderful AIR Studios, in the hall,
recording brilliant British musicians.
One of the key things we said
is that we wanted to bring the stench of him into a room, you know?
Because he poisons everything.
There's something toxic about him.
No matter how charming and amusing he can be, he's also a beast.
I wanted to spend the first few weeks creating a palette of sounds and ideas
and themes and textures
that start to generate a sound world that all the music is going to live in.
Discovering and creating a world which Dracula could bring with him,
because we were quite keen for not only the music to be descriptive of him,
but actually the sound of the music.
So all the new sounds are organic.
So at its core, all these sounds are somewhat disturbing
because their DNA is real.
Wine glasses with blood in rubbed,
making percussions things out of coffins, I mean it's quite macabre,
but also good fun.
It's always a joy to come somewhere where the sets
and the thinking that's gone into production design
is at this level.
I've probably never worked on sets as amazing as these.
Never.
You feel like you are in a castle in 1895.
Part of the original pitch was,
"It's going to be the scariest castle you ever saw."
It's fantastically impressive. I love a great set.
And Castle Dracula is just absolutely magnificent.
There were bits in the script that I had to adhere to,
but, for me, I wanted this grand sweeping entrance.
The costume for Dracula, obviously, is the infamous cape.
That cape is an immense piece of cloth on your back.
We constructed a back so that he could use it as a back wing,
almost like a bat.
We did the interior here.
Very impressive set with this huge staircase,
so, of course, the cape looked amazing.
And with the red lining signifying the blood feel,
it worked really well.
For Jonathan Harker - he'd come from England,
traveling overseas, so he'd be in a traveling outfit.
So it's very British, very tweedy...
The colors were good - a nice contrast against the darkness of Dracula.
As the story continues,
Jonathan gets more and more disheveled and broken down,
and the costume reflects that.
They're making me appear emaciated
through the use of the clothes I'm wearing.
As he was becoming more frail
and finding different routes around the castle,
we also then made the castle a little bit more decayed, as well.
So both of them travel through the story at the same time.
The devil really is in the detail in this job.
It was a very sad day when we had to tear it down.
We left it up for a bit longer than it was due to stay up,
because people couldn't bear to say goodbye to it.
The big challenge in episode one, in terms of prosthetics and makeup,
was Dracula, of course, he starts as he does in the novel as an extremely old man.
As he feeds off Jonathan Harker,
he turns into the more traditional image
of the younger, suaver, darker Dracula.
We knew that Dracula was going to be quite a difficult thing
for him to get through
because he's got makeup,
teeth, lenses, wigs, the lot...
One of the key challenges was the sequence at the convent gates.
We read in the script that Dracula is born out of a wolf.
You read it on the page and think,
"My God, this is so... How is that going to be possible?"
We sculpted the wolf that we could put on the floor
that could still be moving around, still be puppeteered...
that we could rip open, and then from a cavity under the floor
we would push actors through.
This controls the jaw.
-And you've got the head. -Yeah.
You're doing the head movements, moving it from left to right,
up and down, side to side...
These rods here control the legs of the wolf.
Just twitchy little movements and things.
It's not the most pleasant thing I've done.
Blood all over...
I don't know about you, girls,
but I do love a bit of fur.