Production designer Ben Norman has been working as a designer of reality show challenges for a few years, though never on a competition quite on the scale of Squid Game: The Challenge. To be fair, there hasn’t really been a reality competition on the scale of the Netflix series before, which brings together 456 players to compete for $4.56 million in a series of games – some taken from the scripted series and some new.
The choice to incorporate new games in addition to games from the scripted series stemmed in part from a safety concern as well as a desire to keep things new and interesting. Norman says the new games not only threw off players who were expecting the challenges to be identical to the scripted series, but also in some cases threw in the extra element of teamwork.
DEADLINE: When you started working on the series, how much of the games were expected to be exactly like the scripted series versus completely new?
BEN NORMAN: Initially, we were pretty much going to do every game that the drama had. It just went into deep processes, deep research, so just watching the show over and over again and making notes and seeing how things worked or what they used and what the processes were throughout each game. The further down the line we got, we started to work out how we could actually make these things that are not necessarily real. There’s a lot of VFX involved in the drama because some of this stuff is really dangerous and cannot be done, so eventually the further we got with some of the games, we realized that either they were too dangerous to play or the logistics of trying to make them safe to play was actually so costly that we couldn’t really do them at that point. So, that’s when we needed to have X amount of games to make the show a nice competition, and that’s when we started to look into adding in a few extra games. We went through hundreds of different types of really iconic childhood games to try and find something that worked and that’s how we landed on Warships.
DEADLINE: The third episode, “War”, which includes the warships game is what you are nominated for, what was it about the production design of that episode that stood out against the others?
NORMAN: I think because it was a new game, it was something completely different. It hadn’t been copied by the drama, but we managed to retain that kind of Squid Game feel. I think it was partly due to the fact that we took this really iconic game that 90% of people in the world recognized immediately, and then we upscaled it to the point at which the humans were inside of the game and could play. But we still wanted to keep it really true to the feel of Battleships, as it’s known, where you open up the little plastic module and it has your grid and it has your board to put your pegs on and the grid to put all of the ships. We kind wanted to keep that plastic-y, molded, childish graphic feel, but upsize it. And then you throw in the element of the gameplay and the teamwork.
That was the other thing that kind of gave us a reason to choose Battleships or Warships, is because we could then engineer in an element of teamwork, which the reality show needed just to kind of mix things up and catch the players off guard. Most of the people who applied to be on the show had meticulously gone through every single drama game and rehearsed it and practiced and tried all these different things and they had a plan of how to play all of these games. Then suddenly they go in, they think it’s this game and then bang, it’s something completely different and they have to work in a completely different way. So, it caught ‘em off guard.
DEADLINE: You worked with another production designer on the series, Mathieu Weekes. Did you split up the games or did you both collaborate on each game?
NORMAN: It’s sort of a weird mix. If it was anything intricate or had stuff that really needed to be figured out, things like Warships which was its own standalone game board and set, or things like the Glass Bridge… Essentially, what I did is I worked on how the actual bridge worked, the mechanics, the trap doors and the look of the center of it. And then the other designer did all the dorms and some of the processing rooms and generally the outer walls of any game that we did. Like “Red Light, Green Light”, he did the set and then I just dealt with the doll and the mechanics of the doll. It’s just the finer game parts and props and details. There’s so much work, research and development that goes into them that sometimes we find it’s easier to have two separate designers. One has a team that just works out all of those little bits and then the other guy can just get on and move around and just do the big stuff and the overall look.
DEADLINE: What was the most challenging game to design?
NORMAN: Glass Bridge was one, because to try and interpret and make a real-life item that real-life people can play from what happened in the drama is quite a difficult thing, because obviously in the drama they just had plain glass panels that they fell through. We went through quite a process of asking, “Can we do this? Is it possible to use something? Is it glass or something similar?” And obviously there’s a lot of health and safety risks involved. Glass is not possible because it’s dangerous, it can cut you, and also the two types of glass, tempered glass that holds someone’s weight and just normal glass, the clarity of the two looks different so you can tell. You’d be able to look down the line and you know exactly where the path is. We looked at sugar glass that we use for film and TV, but you can’t get the clarity and it’s so fragile, it’d be really hard to get up there. And secondly, again, when they fall through it, it doesn’t break up enough so when you land, it potentially could come down and still hurt you. That’s how we landed on trap doors, but it was quite a long process. And then even once we had the trap doors, the design from there to work out sizing to make the apertures safe and then having people fall and land safely, we had to look into different technologies for the full arrester below because things like foam pits are a bit old hat now and aren’t that safe and they’re quite dirty and then we couldn’t use nets and things. It was dangerous. So, it was a hell of a health and safety challenge to get through with that game.
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