Tuesday, January 06, 2026
Why Percy Jackson proves Vancouver's film crews are among the world's best
Urbanized: For decades, Vancouver has doubled as cities around the world. What the second season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians reveals, however, is something deeper than versatility. It showcases a concentration of craft — costume designers, prop builders, set decorators, sculptors, painters, engineers, and coordinators — capable of building entire fantasy worlds from the ground up. Not virtually. Not hypothetically. But physically, in wood and steel, leather and foam, fabric and paint.
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3 comments:
It makes me so happy to know that this magical world that I grew up reading about has gotten to become a real physical space. When the first season was coming out, I kept seeing things about the LED screen sets they were using, and the end product looked fine, but it made me a little sad that even when making these books real, the setting looked fake. To read this article, and find out that the second season consists of almost entirely practical sets, costumes, and props, gives me hope that the future of television is not just LED screens and CGI touchups. Fantasy movies and shows are so fun because they transport you to a different world, and that effect is somewhat lost when it's clear that the world isn't real, so I’m incredibly happy to find out that Percy Jackson is taking the time to create a real space for these stories to take place.
I had to do a double take at this article because I felt like I was experiencing deja vu! I was so amazed reading this article because I had just had a conversation with a friend studying film at University of British Columbia talking about how the Percy Jackson production crew had been filming and set up just off their campus. He showed me pictures of the outdoor film set, but claimed they didn’t do the magnitude of it justice. They had lighting and other pieces rigged at least a few dozen feet up in the air and truly had no idea what they were doing creating such a spectacle. Referring back to this article, I think it’s so amazing the innovation that’s happening for this production with less use of CGI and creative ideas to bring the world of Percy Jackson to life. The Vancouver area in particular has so much potential as a location, in both history, landscape and the vast local arts scene, and it seems the crew is utilizing that to the max.
I really enjoy just how large scale the TV and film industry can get to be on big budget projects. I appreciate how this article walked the reader through various departments and their different considerations through season one and season two. The collaboration involved in such a structured way is really awesome - to consider how a camera changes all departments, and how something like the shift from CGI to reality impacts all departments, too, is something I find particularly interesting. The photos of the props that are sprinkled throughout this article are stunning pieces in and of themselves, and as are initial design sketches of the costumes, especially. The crew were clearly dedicated to making a given location - either natural or artificial - feel like a fictional location to the cast, camera, and audience. I was particularly interested in Michelle Hendriksen’s work as a prop master, so I took the liberty to google her after reading this article, and discovered she also worked on Wonder, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Night at the Museum, and X-Men in the props department.
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