As Wood mentioned, Sanctuary originally began life on the Internet and premiered last year as a series of eight 15-minute webisodes, which constituted a two-hour pilot. The show was later picked up for TV by The SCI FI Channel and debuts on October 3rd. Created by former Stargate SG-1 writer/producer Damian Kindler, Sanctuary tells the story of Dr. Helen Magnus, a brilliant scientist and immortal beauty who is carrying on her father’s (Dr. Anthony Magnus) work to seek out, study and help abnormals (creatures connected to the evolution of humankind and that roam the Earth). Based in a top secret and massive research facility called Sanctuary, Helen is assisted by her new protégé, Dr. Will Zimmerman, and her daughter Ashley (Emilie Ullerup). These characters as well as others are introduced in the show’s pilot episode, "Sanctuary for All", which has been re-shot for TV.
“The Sanctuary web pilot that we made was an experiment to see how quickly and how well we could get something on the Internet in a very limited amount of time and with limited resources,” recalls Wood. “With it, we made any mistakes that we needed to make and learned from them. The look for the TV pilot will be quite different in that we have a much larger VFX team with us now, so we can throw much more at them. We previously had an in-house team doing our VFX and they did an incredible job. That team, however, would have needed to expand by at least four times in order to do what we’re doing now with the program.
