According to The Hollywood Reporter, The director of Upload, Tom Marshall, along with the production designer Rachel O’Toole, went in depth on how they were able to create the futuristic scenery for season three of the show.
Upload, according to Prime Video, is “From the Emmy-winning Greg Daniels (The Office, Parks & Rec) comes a hilarious new sci-fi comedy. In the future people can upload their consciousness to a luxurious digital afterlife. When party boy Nathan gets uploaded to a virtual resort he meets the down-to-earth Nora who starts as his customer service “angel”, but becomes so much more as she helps him find friendship, love and purpose.”
One of the most eerie aspects of this show is the confined living spaces, which were inspired by Hong Kong’s coffin houses, says The Hollywood Reporter. Marshall told The Hollywood Reporter that ““It was, depressingly, sort of easy to get lots of references for those types of places.” Marshall also refrenced student housing for various colleges in which students are crammed into very small enviroments.
O’Toole commented on how these inspirations added to the futuristic setting, citing to The Hollywood Reporter that, “We leaned into the bleakness — the smallness, the tightness of it and then putting another business next door.” O’Toole also revealed that she came up with cost-effective designs for things in the show because when imagining a futuristic scenario, “we’re going to have an abundance of plastic that we’ve thrown away.”
The Hollywood Reporter claims that Marshall also took inpiration from movies such as Dune and O’Toole took inspiration from Blade runner. O’Toole told the magazine that “You’re building on the idea of minimalism, sci-fi and no color because they don’t care about the workers. They’re making a choice to keep you in that version of 1984 — in your place. This is not Google where you’re meant to feel bright, cheery and part of a team. You work for them.”