Foundation - Creating the Crisis - The effort behind the scenes of Foundation's second crisis was as vast as the galaxy it showcased. Foundation season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+
More than a century after the Season 1 finale, tension mounts throughout the galaxy. As the Cleons unravel, a vengeful queen plots to destroy Empire from within. Hari, Gaal, and Salvor discover a colony of Mentalics with special abilities that threaten to alter psychohistory itself. Meanwhile, the Foundation and Empire are on a collision course for war with the fate of humanity in the balance.
Foundation is led by Emmy-nominated actors Jared Harris and Lee Pace, alongside rising stars Lou Llobell and Leah Harvey. Also starring returning cast Laura Birn, Cassian Bilton and Terrence Mann, Season 2 of Foundation introduces new characters and stars, including Isabella Laughland (Brother Constant), Kulvinder Ghir (Poly Verisof), Ella-Rae Smith (Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion), Holt McCallany (Warden Jaegger Fount), Rachel House (Tellem Bond), Nimrat Kaur (Yanna Seldon), Ben Daniels (Bel Riose), and Dimitri Leonidas (Hober Mallow).
Foundation is produced for Apple by Skydance Television and led by showrunner and executive producer David S. Goyer, with Alex Graves, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Bill Bost, Robyn Asimov and Marcy Ross also serving as executive producers.
More than a century after the Season 1 finale, tension mounts throughout the galaxy. As the Cleons unravel, a vengeful queen plots to destroy Empire from within. Hari, Gaal, and Salvor discover a colony of Mentalics with special abilities that threaten to alter psychohistory itself. Meanwhile, the Foundation and Empire are on a collision course for war with the fate of humanity in the balance.
Foundation is led by Emmy-nominated actors Jared Harris and Lee Pace, alongside rising stars Lou Llobell and Leah Harvey. Also starring returning cast Laura Birn, Cassian Bilton and Terrence Mann, Season 2 of Foundation introduces new characters and stars, including Isabella Laughland (Brother Constant), Kulvinder Ghir (Poly Verisof), Ella-Rae Smith (Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion), Holt McCallany (Warden Jaegger Fount), Rachel House (Tellem Bond), Nimrat Kaur (Yanna Seldon), Ben Daniels (Bel Riose), and Dimitri Leonidas (Hober Mallow).
Foundation is produced for Apple by Skydance Television and led by showrunner and executive producer David S. Goyer, with Alex Graves, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Bill Bost, Robyn Asimov and Marcy Ross also serving as executive producers.
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00:00 ♪♪
00:02 There have been rumors of an alliance
00:04 at the edge of the galaxy.
00:05 There's a tremendous amount of detail
00:07 that's required in bringing Foundation to life.
00:10 This season is a lot bigger than the first season
00:12 in scale and scope.
00:13 Everything's so detailed.
00:15 Everything's put together so well.
00:16 It's insane.
00:18 The wardrobe, the set designs,
00:20 they're all completely brilliant.
00:22 We show this factory progression of technology.
00:26 Roughly speaking, it takes us two years to make a season.
00:29 Figure six months for pre-production,
00:31 seven to eight months of filming,
00:33 and then close to a year post-production
00:36 because we have so many visual effects.
00:38 Our real goal on the show is to give people that scope
00:41 that they don't expect on television.
00:42 ♪♪
00:44 Hang on!
00:45 [ Shouting indistinctly ]
00:47 ♪♪
00:55 And action.
00:57 When I started Foundation,
00:58 I decided that I want to film
00:59 as much of it on location as possible.
01:01 I want the crew and the actors to feel the heat,
01:05 to feel the wind,
01:07 because I felt that it would just make everything
01:09 feel more real.
01:11 Smart boy.
01:12 Season two is very much a story of asymmetrical warfare.
01:16 The Foundation, compared to Empire, is a speck.
01:19 But slowly but surely,
01:21 the Foundation is gaining influence.
01:24 They've grown, and they've taken over
01:27 the outskirts of the galaxy.
01:31 The sets and the locations that we've been on
01:33 for both seasons have been picked out so incredibly.
01:36 It helps us create the world,
01:38 and it makes it so much easier to be in the moment.
01:42 Season two goes all over the place.
01:44 There are a lot of new worlds, and they're all very different.
01:47 We were able to find all these new planets
01:49 and give them a unique look.
01:53 We're gonna return to Trantor.
01:55 In Ireland, we had the main palisades,
01:57 the original Mural of Souls,
01:58 and we built a new clone tank set.
02:01 We're also back in a different Synex.
02:03 A Synex that's completely covered in water.
02:07 The world of Ignis, we had the jungle in the Czech Republic,
02:11 but there are oceans in Ignis,
02:12 so those scenes were shot in the Canaries.
02:15 I spent three days on sand dunes,
02:17 and it was miles away from everywhere else.
02:19 But we have so much fun on set.
02:22 I love every second of it.
02:25 We're in the Summer Palace.
02:27 We wanted the elements in this set
02:29 to make it feel like you were in this
02:30 Angkor Wat-type of jungle palace.
02:33 Whoever's in charge, please could we end this charade?
02:37 I thought you might be the one to notice.
02:40 Terminus, where the Church of Selden is,
02:42 was actually shot in the old Skoda factory
02:44 in the Czech Republic.
02:46 Terminus City is in Forteventura,
02:47 and it's just so real.
02:50 It's in the middle of an empty space,
02:53 and they've built a village.
02:55 It's not difficult to imagine you're on a barren planet.
02:58 A lot of the locations that we've chosen,
03:00 the population in North America
03:02 have not seen or don't know about,
03:04 so it lets us spend more time in those locations
03:07 as our backdrops for all of the storytelling,
03:10 as if it's an alien world.
03:11 And we're always trying to push the look of the show.
03:14 ♪♪
03:18 Wow.
03:19 Look at you.
03:22 The fashion in season two is just fantastic.
03:26 Our costume designer, Jane Petrie,
03:28 she and her team had to come up with
03:30 thousands upon thousands of costumes.
03:32 We're flying through nine planets,
03:34 and there's no through thread, so we have to come up
03:36 with a whole new concept for each planet
03:38 and a new backstory for where the costumes have come from.
03:41 One of the things that we really wanted to do
03:43 with season two with our costumes
03:45 was just explode the color palette.
03:47 We've got these wonderfully lush reds
03:49 that are embodied by the Church of the Galactic Spirit.
03:52 We've got these kind of rainbow colors
03:54 that are embodied by Cloud Dominion.
03:56 Compared to season one,
03:58 it's been really good to get outside more.
04:01 It's a little bit brighter.
04:02 We go to more planets, so there's a lot more variety.
04:05 ♪♪
04:07 Welcome to Trenter.
04:09 This season's Day is completely different than last season's.
04:13 Day has turned in his blue armor.
04:15 He's gotten a little bit more flamboyant.
04:17 Lee's wearing chain mail this season.
04:19 Soldiers!
04:21 Allow me to present the Doyen of the Trade Leagues,
04:25 Sereth I, sole descendant of Dominion.
04:28 ♪♪
04:30 Cloud Dominion.
04:32 They come from a place where they produce
04:33 the best pigments in the galaxy.
04:36 All the imperial blues in pure form.
04:39 We took slices of agate and worked them into a print,
04:42 and we had these big billowing robes.
04:45 The look of Queen Sereth and Enjoiner Ruin,
04:48 all of the Cloud Dominion is different
04:49 to anything I've ever seen.
04:51 Cloud Dominion is the exact opposite of what Trentor is,
04:54 which is blues, classics, and everything is so strict.
04:57 And then you have these women come into this universe,
04:59 and everything is billowy and feminine.
05:02 [Sighs]
05:03 What brings you to our world?
05:05 For season two, the location that really has embedded itself
05:08 in costumes would be Ignis.
05:11 There's an awful lot of the environment around them
05:13 that I felt would really be part of their clothing.
05:16 And then we worked with all of the colors of the plant life
05:18 and the vegetation.
05:20 They need your help.
05:22 I like my plan, wherein we keep to ourselves.
05:25 ♪♪
05:29 "Foundation" is the most complex show
05:32 in terms of post-production of any project
05:34 I've ever been involved in.
05:36 On average, we have about 4,000 visual-effects shots
05:39 per season.
05:42 The goal is to get everything photo-real,
05:45 to get the spaceships to move like we think spaceships
05:47 would really move, to get our creatures
05:50 to have the same kind of fidelity
05:51 that any kind of animal would in our world.
05:55 I have stories in me, many stories.
05:57 Would you like to hear one?
05:58 Demerzel's dungeon and how she's been split into pieces
06:02 was based on the idea that she can heal herself
06:05 and make herself whole at any point.
06:08 So the prison had to reflect that she could be kept,
06:10 separated by glass panes,
06:13 and her circuitry was then sandwiched between them.
06:16 And then on the outer slices was her human form,
06:18 front and back, and painted her circuitry
06:20 onto these glass panes with LED lighting
06:23 to make it feel physical.
06:24 And then my team will go back in and we'll augment
06:27 and give it that little bit of extra love
06:29 to make it feel real.
06:32 We probably spend a couple of weeks
06:34 coloring each episode,
06:37 going through it shot by shot,
06:39 trying to make everything as artful as possible.
06:42 It's a highly technical process.
06:43 You can change the mood of the scene
06:45 by making it darker and blue.
06:47 Sometimes they're shooting over three days,
06:50 which one day it's raining and the next day it's not.
06:52 So integrating all of those shots back together
06:54 with visual effects shots
06:56 requires a level of intricacy and detail.
06:58 [Gunshots]
07:00 [Thunder rumbling]
07:03 And then you've got sound.
07:05 We've got a sound team called Sound Dogs,
07:07 who are incredible.
07:09 Our job is to help supplement and exaggerate
07:12 a lot of the visuals that we're seeing.
07:14 I think just a little at the head,
07:15 and then you're good.
07:17 This year, there's beaches,
07:18 and now you're dealing with waves
07:19 and sounds that are clobbering the dialogue a bit,
07:21 so you're trying to clean all that up.
07:23 For Tyler's part and his crew,
07:24 they're creating sounds of ships that don't really exist,
07:28 creatures that don't exist.
07:30 You're building a sound world from scratch.
07:32 There's always a sense of discovery in this process.
07:35 I believe that post-production
07:38 are one of the things that really makes Foundation
07:40 feel different and more cinematic
07:42 than your average show.
07:44 I think it's kind of cool. Yeah.
07:45 Nice job, guys.
07:46 Only empire commands the stars.
07:49 Crush them now.
07:50 Shows forward.
07:52 I can't wrap my head around the craftsmanship on this show.
07:56 The attention to detail is just extraordinary
07:59 that you could only really get on a production like this.
08:01 Action!
08:03 The stakes are much higher in season two.
08:06 The galaxy is countless number of planets,
08:08 10,000 inhabited worlds,
08:10 so we see more of them this season.
08:12 I didn't think that it could get any more vast,
08:15 and somehow, someway, the team has made it even bigger.
08:21 In season two, the rocket takes off,
08:23 and we've been having an absolute blast.
08:27 It's such an incredible spectacle,
08:29 and I've never seen anything like it.
08:31 Fire Empire, kind of reckoning.
08:35 I am so grateful and lucky that I get to be a part of this.
08:38 I think we really succeeded in season two,
08:41 and it was a real treat bringing it to life.
08:44 Fly us out of here!
08:47 Whoo!
08:49 ♪♪
08:57 ♪♪
08:58 ♪♪