“I really wanted to be lead editor on this, because I loved it so much,” says Silo editor Hazel Baillie. “I loved episode one so much, but I also thought for a big sci-fi show, it’s not common [to have] a female lead editor.”
Apple TV+’s Silo takes place in a dystopian future where a community of people live in a mysterious silo, hundreds of stories underground. The show follows Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) an engineer who begins to question whether the rules of their society are really there for the benefit of everyone. “The great thing about Silo is history has been erased in a way, so they don’t carry the same prejudices that our world has,” says Baillie. “But one thing I would say about Juliette, she has the attitude of a woman making it in a male-dominated industry, so although she’s maybe not grown up with that prejudice, she does have these walls up and she’s very combative in a way sometimes.”
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In editing scenes with Juliette, Baillie found ways to highlight when her walls dropped and she was able to show emotion to the audience. “When she shows emotion and when she lets people in, it’s so amazing for the audience to see,” she says. “That’s what’s great about us as the audience, is that we get to be with her when she’s on her own, when she’s having these breakthroughs and when she isn’t hiding herself.”
Since the world of Silo has its own set of rules and laws, it was important for Baillie to slowly introduce them to the audience without forcing exposition. “You don’t want the teaching of that to get in the way of the audience enjoying the journey and emotionally connecting with the characters,” she says. “How early do we even reveal that they are underground, for example? In the end, we decided to reveal that very early, because we thought once you know that, everything that comes after is so much richer.”
As the editor of episodes 1, 2 and 10, Baillie was in charge of editing the three “going out” sequences where characters leave the silo, which she says were challenging to get right. “You’ve got the world within the silo, in the cafeteria with people watching, then you’ve got the actual ceremony and them going out, them getting ready and what happens when they go into the vault, and you’ve also got… what they’re seeing through their visor when they go up. It’s a difficult balance.”
One aspect that she believes really helped with the performances was the ability for the actors in the cafeteria to actually see the characters on the screen exiting the silo, rather than adding that later on in post. “We filmed that beforehand and visual effects worked on it all so it would be ready and could be played live in the room and shot as if it was happening, which I think was really great,” says Baillie. “It really added to it and the reactions from the people in the cafeteria were really authentic because of that.”
Click the video above to watch the full interview.