Learn More About That Wicked Dance Party From The Orphan Black Finale

Dancing with myself, oh, oh, oh, oh!
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While I’m very sad Orphan Black won’t be back for a while, their season finale was incredibly enjoyable to watch (check out my visual recap!). Not only did it have all the Clone Drama we’ve come to expect, it also featured a really fun, yet highly technical, scene. This video shows how it was done, and below we have one of the creators, Graeme Manson, explaining a bit more.

Manson posted some background information on the BBC America website. He writes:

“Clone Dance Party” had been written on a card and pinned to the board very early in the season 2 writer’s room.  As often happens, what started as kind of a joke grew into a good idea – a non-talky, active way to capture the emotional climax of the season. To reunite our Trinity of Sarah, Cosima and Alison – with a new moon, Helena. Because of course we’re not satisfied with three clones interacting. No, we just gotta try four

Heroic on set work by 1st AD Joanna Moore and Katherine Hughes and their team – the culmination of a couple months of pitching the sequence and marshalling the extra time in the shooting schedule to pull it off.  Key crew gave lunches to meetings; Tat, Jordan and 3 acting doubles stole rehearsal time during the shooting of 109. Then it was time to bring on the Technodolly!  The motion control beast that comes with several operators, multiple monitors, and its own separate playback system.

There’s lots more, including photos, at the source, but I just had to share this image of their floor plan:

CloneDanceFloor

Bravo!

Previously in Orphan Black

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Jill Pantozzi
Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."