200K Views: Behind the Scenes of The Expanse Season 5

About Shohreh Aghdashloo

Shohreh Aghdashloo is an Emmy Award-winning, Oscar-nominated actress. Her prolific work on stage and screen has been lauded for decades in her native Iran and worldwide, especially in her adopted home, the United States. American audiences know her best from her Oscar-nominated performance in “House Of Sand And Fog” and her Emmy-winning role in HBO’s acclaimed “House Of Saddam.”

Shohreh plays the lead character “Chrisjen Avasarala” in the futuristic TV series “The Expanse,” based on the famous New York Times bestselling book series of the same name. Chrisjen Avasarala is an intelligent and passionate member of a political family legacy who has risen high in the ranks of Earth’s governing body. Amazon Studios streams all six seasons of “The Expanse” on Prime Video.

The Project

We created a schedule of her day and all the departments she would go through until she was ready to shoot the episode. This included the morning call with the producer, directors and the crew, hair & make-up, costumes department, and on-set production.

Following her with the camera would give an unprecedented view of what it’s like to work at the set. We deliberately kept the camera movement organic and occasionally stabilized the motion picture to look more authentic.

To keep the content concise for social media, we split it into two parts with a teaser clip each for Twitter since the videos were longer than 2:20 minutes.

Part One: From Rehearsal to Final Cut

The first part takes the viewer on a journey through Shohreh Aghdashloo’s daily schedule. During the hair & make-up session, I used two cameras to record from different angles, while Brian Hui and Yasmine Crosdale would do their work.

Thanks to Jeff Woolnough, director of this episode (506 – “Tribes”), we were able to create a comparison of the rehearsal, shooting, and the final cut. Something which hasn’t been done for The Expanse to date.

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Part Two: Set Walkthrough

In the second part, Shohreh Aghdashloo leads the viewer around on the set, from her trailer to the different studios. Even though we had a concept of what we wanted to show, most of it was improvised and shot on the fly.

Providing such a thorough look at the season five-set caught Expanse fans by surprise. They were finally able to see the insides of “UN One”, the “Luna Bar” and much more.

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Results

Shohreh Aghdashloo and I are very happy with the outcome. More than 740 comments came in from all over the world.

In addition, its teasers on Twitter reached 37,000 views (Part 1, Part 2), while the full clips gathered 102,345 views on Instagram (Part 1, Part 2) and 61,700 on her Facebook page (Part 1, Part 2).