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“That idea is so much part of the lore and it's also part of my own fascinations," says Bohem, a mythology major in college. "It goes back thousands of years to the stories of the incubus and succubus. There are all these stories of women who go out into the woods and come back pregnant. Not to step on any religious toes, but it's a story that we've embraced in our culture as well, in the form of the Immaculate Conception. It's a motif that you're led to by the lore. And it makes a hell of a good story."

After Bohem completed his early drafts of the script in 1999, the next challenge loomed: turning the vision he had created in collaboration with Spielberg into television reality. Executive Producer Steve Beers (Dark Angel, 21 Jump Street) was brought in to oversee the production, which was based in Vancouver, B.C.

"In most shows, you either have period settings or you have special effects or you have prosthetic make-up," says Beers. "We had all that and more. This wasn't a show like, say, Band of Brothers, where once you establish who the characters are, where they are, how they dress and how they’re equipped, it carries through for the duration of the show.

"We spanned over fifty years: each of the first six episodes is in a different period and in episode six we jump ahead in history three times," said Beers. "We had four generations to cover, so we
effectively had to cast a new series every two or three episodes. The story takes place all over the country - Las Vegas, New Mexico, Texas, Maine, North Dakota - and we had to find those locations within a reasonable distance of Vancouver. And then, of course, we had aliens and spaceships and technology that we had to create.

The challenge of re-creating the look and feel of six decades was handled by Production Designer Chris Gorak, who oversaw a team of craftsmen, artists and location-scouts.

“We didn't have the budget to build period sets, so we had to find period elements in otherwise modern neighborhoods and we had to be inventive," says Gorak, who used more than 500 sets over the course of 10 episodes. "Vancouver is very green and lush and a lot of our early stories took place in the Southwest and Midwest. So we got strategic and created our own world: our version of Texas or New Mexico. We shot very specific angles - we called them wedges or slices of pie - and by doing that we created something that the audience can recognize as Texas or New Mexico or Maine."

Sometimes, they got lucky. While the crew was shooting scenes set in Alaska, it snowed, a relatively rare occurrence in warm, wet Vancouver. And sometimes, luck was not on their side.

"One time we were supposed to be shooting a Texas elementary school in October," says Gorak "That day the snow was coming down at the rate of about an inch an hour. After five inches, we called it a day. I told the producers that maybe we could reset the scene in Northern Texas."

Cars, clothes and make-up also played a big role in giving the viewer a sense of the passing years.

“Hair, make-up, wardrobe and period vehicles are a quick way to sell a period," says Gorak. "If someone is standing in front a house that could have been built at any time over a hundred year period, you can define the period quickly if someone pulls up in an appropriate period car or wearing period clothes. In this case, we used hundreds of period cars."

Gorak credits Wardrobe Designer Susan De Laval (Dark Angel, Sliders), Key Makeup Dana Michelle-Hamel (An Unexpected Life) and Key Hair Paul Edwards (Dark Angel) with helping define the look of each decade and create the impression of the passage of time.

"Susan had an incredible challenge. When you're spanning over five decades, not many things carry over, so each episode was a new beginning for her," he says. "Dana, Paul and our Special Effects Make-up crew had to age some of the actors more than 30 years. In some scenes, you'd have a 28-year-old actor with a 24-year-old mother or father."

It wasn't enough, however, to just have the sets and character look match the era. The cinematographers on TAKEN took the next step, subtly tweaking the visual style of each episode to mimic the decade.

Directors of Photography Joel Ransom (The X-Files, Band of Brothers) and Jonathon Freeman (The Lost Battalion, The Courage To Love) used their knowledge of historical production techniques to give each episode a look appropriate to the time in which it was set.

"For the early episodes, I researched the kind of equipment - the cranes and dollies, for example - that was used in the 1940s and 1950s," says Ransom, who shot the first five episodes. "We even thought about shooting the first episode in black-and-white, since people associate that look with that period. But there was some concern that, without really well known actors in the premier episode, people might not stick with it. Instead, we went for a sort of sepia look. In the 1950s episode, we corrected the film to look like Technicolor in order to make the colors pop and we used tungsten lights to give it that period feel. In episode three, we dialled out the colour to give it a sort of 1960s black and white feel that distinguished it from of episode 4, which is set in the 1970s and is in full colour."

While Taken carefully documents the cultural and social changes that take place in the human world, one thing remains constant through the ten episodes: the alien visitors, who are seen in both alien and human form, and their remarkable spaceships, which appear as both glowing orbs and as mechanical crafts.

"The design process for the ship was interesting," says Gorak. "The story is that the aliens come in a ball of light energy, but there's also a crashed UFO, so we had to come up with a way to look at the ship changing from one form to the other. Our first pass was very organic-looking, but after discussions with Steven Spielberg, he steered us towards a more mechanical model that was rooted in technology that the audience could understand. Since we start the story in 1947, we ended up bringing in design concepts from the present day – industrial design, architectural design, automotive design - and using them to in such a way that they felt like they were from another world." Gorak also drew on the mythology to create the relic that Owen Crawford found at Roswell and that comes to life in later episodes.

"In the mythology, they said they found a piece of the craft after the Roswell crash," says Gorak. "In history, it was dopey little piece of a steel I-beam, but we took that idea and gave it a twist, gave it our own look in such a way that it would still be true to the lore. At first it was just static and then we went through several renditions, finally creating something that comes to life, that glows and has script scrolling back and forth over it. In the end, it had a sort of religious quality to it."

The challenge of creating believable alien characters fell to Co-producer and Visual Effects Supervisor Jim Lima (The Others, Strange Days). Rather than use animatronics or other mechanical means, Lima built a 3-D model of an alien then scanned it into the computer to create a digital alien that could be inserted into scenes.

“If Jurassic Park forever changed the way we perceive dinosaurs, then Taken was going to forever change the way we perceive UFO mythology and aliens," says Lima. “I had very extensive meetings with Steven Spielberg about the aliens, discussing the lore and the mythology and the accounts of people who have reported to have seen aliens," he added. "Steven has an amazing knowledge in this area, because when he did Close Encounters, he went and interviewed these people and had heard these things first-hand."

Given the basic parameters of the creature - four feet tall, grey skin, thin with long necks, arms and fingers, huge almond-shaped eyes set in oversized head - Lima set about trying to bring them to life.

"I started out with a sort of traditional artistic approach, but I realized that to get this to the next level, I had to do what paleontologists do with dinosaurs or early man: start from the bones and build it up from there,"he says. "I started working very photo-realistically, scanning different types of skin textures, taking pictures of different types of creatures, from older people to sea lions and dolphins. The alien eyes are actually my wife's eyes, stretched out and enlarged. The skin is a collage of photo-realistic images, taken from living things, which gives us that moistness and depth of personality and aliveness we were looking for."

Lima also took the unusual step of building his own visual effect unit for Taken, rather than sending the work out to visual effects houses. It's an approach he pioneered in 1992, while working with Spielberg on Seaquest DSV and used again on Spielberg's NBC series The Others.

"Normally on a project like this, you'd hire one of the visual effects houses to do the work," says Lima. "But back in 1992, we were faced with the problem that, given what the effects houses were charging, we would only be able to afford about three visual FX per episode on a show that everyone expected to be spectacular. So we built a unit - bought the equipment, hired the animators - and it was very successful. We did it again on The Others and when I took the reel around town, people thought it was for a feature film."

Having an in-house visual effects unit allowed Lima to do things other series only dream about and to do it at a cost that allows liberal use of visual effects. On average, each episode of Taken contains 80 visual effects, about twice as many as on a network sci-fi show like The X-Files or Dark Angel.

"We are able, just for example, to do the kind of miniature shooting that you would do on a $80 million feature film,” he says. “This is something you just don't see on television."

Having the unit in-house also allows the crew to avail itself of Spielberg's extensive knowledge and expertise. "Because we're only working on Taken and because we have people who are here because they want to work for Steven, we can be committed to giving him exactly what he wants," says Lima. During production, we sent out tapes every week and Steven was always copied on those tapes and when his comments came back, they were always spot on. We are so fortunate to be working for the absolute master of science fiction. This is probably not unlike what people must have felt like when they worked for Cecile B. deMille."

If nothing else, Taken embraces the epic scale that deMille brought to movies nearly 80 years ago. In a narrative that spans five decades and four generations, combines human drama with dazzling effects, and offers a secret history of the 20th Century, Taken not only breathes new life into the miniseries genre, but breaks new ground.

“The sheer size of this project stretches the mini-series to the absolute limit,” says Producer Richard Heus (Serving in Silence, Christmas on Division Street) “I think what we’re doing is, in a way, reinvigorating a television genre that had become fairly predictable. I think we are creating programming that can be a very successful event for both the audience and the broadcaster.”

For Leslie Bohem, who, in collaboration with Spielberg, took the idea from a concept to words on the page and marveled as those words came to life, Taken is already a success.

“It has exceeded all my expectations," he says. "You forget when you're in the middle of it just how really, really ambitious this project is. It's stunning to me to see what these guys - and I mean them, not me - have pulled off. It looks great. It's moving. They did it."

In-Depth - Taken