"It was old and cantankerous." "Our doors didn't quietly open with a nice little "How do you do?" hiss." "It was dirty." "It was very romantic, I think, for a spaceship." "It was extremely romantic." "We got such a sense of this was our ride." "This was..." "This was the thing that kept us together, kept us in the air, flying, working." "When you see the first time Malcolm Reynolds lays eyes on Serenity, it's a love story right there." "He sees it, and you see it in his face." "He's in love with this." "And it's a pure..." "It's a real love." "The ship, Serenity, is..." "In a way, it's the 10th character and it couldn't be more important." "It's a character in the sense that Mal's need for this ship, and what it means to him and also, how it makes us feel in a scene is as important as what the characters are doing." "We designed her very carefully." "Carey Meyer, our brilliant production designer, and I went through color charts." "We came up with a color scheme starting from the engine room, through to the bridge." "We went from very hot, warm tones, through to, sort of more even tones, some very cold, blue tones up in the bridge." "It got very hot in the back, very cold in the front." "Not only does Serenity have a character, we wanted each space to, sort of, have its own character as well which would, sort of, play into all the different characters in the show." "Everything was done, you know, with that in mind." "It's, like, this room is the engine room." "Kaylee lives here." "Kaylee is about earthiness, and warmth, and sexuality and optimism." "So, you know, we rusted everything up so it was a very warm brown." "That's my good girl." "It was a great ship." "We loved the little details." "Just that Kaylee wrote her name out in beautiful little flowers above her room." "Every place was very specific to what was happening in that room." "Then the dining room, with its floral pattern clearly done by Kaylee." "Yellow, again, kind of a warm..." "But, sort of, a more diffuse so that it could lend itself to a lot of different stuff." "For me, the dinner table when all nine of us are sitting there and eating together, were and are, always the most special times we were shooting the show." "I wanna hear about the natty thing." "Inara's shuttle, obviously, deep reds and golds and very lush and very sensuous because that's, you know, her trade and her character." "And, also, the way she and Mal are with each other is very..." "There's a romantic tension and when they're in that shuttle together it's there on the screen, in the set." "What's your game?" "The bridge was..." "It was Alan's." "He took it and owned it." "The chair was really comfortable." "It could recline things came up and down, and when we were on the bridge I got to sit there." "It's different from other shows where the captain sat there." "But the captain didn't know how to fly, so I sat in the chair with him over me." "There were three switches, my magical three switches I always hit." "When anybody told me to do something the first thing I did was hit these three switches that have no purpose." "It was, like, "Okay, I'm about to do something," switches." "They make good "chicky" sounds." "I remember meeting Joss for lunch, talking about things." "This was after I'd gotten the job." "We were hanging out and he said, "Would you like to see the ship?"" "I said, "Yes"." "And we went there, and it was colossal." "It was very important in "Serenity" to as much as possible, introduce the ship." "Some of it I cut out for length, and some is there but the idea of going from place to place to show that we did, in fact, have the entire ship built all the way 190 feet from one end to the other so that people would really get the sense we're living here." "Upstairs was a continuous set, and downstairs was a continuous set." "They were separated on different stages, because one was above the other." "But we also did that because we knew we'd want to be shooting second units and so it was beneficial for us to have the two sets separated." "We had this entire structure that was our ship." "So it was easy to get a feel for how big it was." "If you were to walk on the set, you'd think it might be a real ship because there were stairs and the stairs led to the next set which connected to the next set." "I remember the first time I got on that set..." "Because it's completely open, the grating and there are very few railings and I was just like:" ""I've gotta run up"." "It feels like you're on air like you're not stepping on anything." "That was hard." "I got vertigo." "We wanted everything to be completely exposed." "We wanted..." "We wanted to know that they were just, you know, rigging this thing together with baling twine, and that it barely worked." "And then the effects people made it into..." "Made it into what it was, as far as what it could do." "Joss, Carey Meyer, and myself, we sat down to the table and basically talked about the ship, Serenity." "What is Serenity?" "Where did it come from?" "How does it fly?" "What kind of a class ship is it?" "What's inside of it?" "You know, he always knew that he wanted it to, sort of reference the bug, the firefly bug." "I just, literally, started you know, doodling with different little ships and little ideas." "We went into sketch mode with the idea that Joss had, which was:" ""I think this spaceship should have qualities of a bird but also of a firefly with this long neck that has the ability to look over a long space. "" "But with a bigger abdomen that reminded him of this bug-like creature." "When you see it passing through space, you could look at it as an insect." "Something that annoys the Alliance, which plays a big role in our show." "One of the things we latched onto for interplanetary travel was this idea of a big fusion explosion behind the backside of the spaceship that would propel it faster than anything we have on Earth." "That would be interesting." "And then we could play with the idea that, you know, it might have a glow which we could use as an exterior light, which would allow the ship to look like a firefly." "In early stages of developing Serenity one of the things we wanted to do is develop a way for it to fly through the atmosphere despite its immense size and also land with some sort of grace, while keeping into continuity with its bird/insect-like design." "That being said, we decided the ship would have a V.T.O.L. capability." "V.T.O.L is an air motion employed by the Air Force with the Harrier jet which basically consists of these nozzles, these high-powered nozzles that articulate and allow the airships to take off vertically and then switch their apparatus and fly horizontally." "We have the feet that would come down just like legs." "They would ballast the entire weight of the ship and it would..." "As it would come to rest, these engines, too, would come to rest and fold in like bird wings." "That was the idea, that it would have this action like a bird." "It would have this action like an insect." "It made it feel more character-like." "There were times when I needed to get prepared for a scene and all I would do is just walk through the set." "I would walk through and just take it in." "Take in all the memories of scenes that we'd done in each room and remember what it felt like and that would be enough inspiration to get me ready to do a scene." "When we weren't shooting, we were hanging out on the ship." "So if we were doing something in the bridge and you needed to stay close for a scene coming up everybody would be hanging out in what was the ship's lounge area." "...everybody would be hanging out in what was the ship's lounge area." "There was a little nook, a little stairway, in "Serenity," where I carried Jewel up as we're going up and back to the engine room." "I used to go up there and just sit because it was dark." "It really was a stairway that led to nowhere." "But it was a really quiet place, so I'd go hang out there." "I think the name of the ship is just extremely appropriate." "Everybody found a kind of serenity in the ship." "It gave all of us a huge sense of pride." "I mean, it was our ship." "It's a place we all looked forward to going to to being, and to playing in." "Serenity."