Silo Editor Hazel Baillie – Production Value

“I really wanted to become editor-in-chief because I enjoyed it so much,” says silo Editor Hazel Baillie. “I really enjoyed the first episode, but I also thought it was unusual for a major science fiction series to have a female editor-in-chief.”

AppleTV+ silo is set in a dystopian future where a community of people live in a mysterious silo hundreds of floors underground. The series follows Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), an engineer who begins to question whether the rules of her society are really for the good of all. “The great thing about silo “History has been erased in some ways, so they don’t carry the same prejudices that our world does,” says Baillie. “But one thing I have to say about Juliette is that she has the mindset of a woman making it in a male-dominated industry. So even though she may not have grown up with those prejudices, she has put up those walls and is very combative at times in some ways.”

When editing scenes with Juliette, Baillie found ways to highlight when her walls came down and she could show emotion to the audience. “When she shows emotion and lets people in, it’s so amazing for the audience to see,” she says. “That’s the great thing about us as an audience: we can be with her when she’s alone, when she has these breakthroughs, and when she’s not hiding.”

As the world of silo has its own rules and laws, so it was important to Baillie to introduce them to the audience slowly, without forcing them. “You don’t want the communication of these things to stop the audience from enjoying the journey and building an emotional connection with the characters,” she says. “For example, how early do we even reveal that they’re underground? Ultimately, we decided to reveal that very early on because we thought once you know that, everything that comes after is so much richer.”

As editor of episodes 1, 2 and 10, Baillie was responsible for editing the three “exit” sequences where the characters leave the silo. She says getting those sequences right was a challenge. “You have the world in the silo, in the cafeteria where people are watching, then you have the actual ceremony and their exit, their preparations and what happens when they go into the vault, and you also have… what they see through their visor when they go up. It’s a difficult balance.”

One aspect she said really helped with the performances was the ability for the actors in the cafeteria to actually see the characters come out of the silo on screen, rather than adding that in later in post-production. “We filmed that in advance and the visual effects edited everything so it was ready and could be played live in the room and filmed as if it was happening, which I think is really great,” Baillie says. “That really added something to it and the reactions of the people in the cafeteria were really authentic because of it.”

Click on the video above to watch the full interview.