A lot of work went into getting the look of the Barnes family home just right. Tom Hammock, production designer on the Outcast pilot, tells the story behind the story of how he brought the set to life.
No place like home.
After finding the perfect location and learning that it was going to be demolished, Hammock reveals that the production “actually bought the real house and moved it to a different location for the show.”
There’s a psychology to this set.
Hammock explains: “Kyle is and always has been living in poverty. But it was a different kind of poverty when he was a kid living with his mother than now.” He adds, “The idea is that Child Protective Services came and got Kyle and started packing up the house and then stopped for some reason. It’s Kyle’s choice now that the house is still partially packed up. There are so many childhood photographs of him and his mother scattered around, sticking out of boxes. You see the very basics, the very necessities for living. He has his mattress on the floor, but that’s literally it.”
The devil is in the details.
“The pantry is one of the most complicated two-and-a-half-by-three-foot sets I’ve ever done. The walls were actually cut out of the pantry of another real house that was falling down. I spent two days doing all the little drawings. My crew sort of locked me in there with a pencil. The idea is that as Kyle got bigger, he got angrier and angrier, so the subjects become more war-like and drawn in a rougher way. If you’re farther down, there are drawings of his mother that are sweet. Then you get up towards the top of the wall, and there are airplanes shooting each other.”
Cereal is way more than a household staple.
“We worked really hard to make the products on the shelves of the pantry correct. There are old boxes like King Vitamin cereal—things that scream early ’80s, but have since disappeared. Some are West Virginia-only products that we actually had a friend go to a rural grocery store and buy. The others were either created by a graphic designer who went through Quaker Oats archives, found an old box and recreated it from scratch, or were purchased on eBay—$30 for an old cereal box. But it’s worth it.”
So, to recap:
“It’s an immersive experience.”