The war room in season 6 episode of What We Do in the Shadows, "Nandor's Army" needed many maps and blueprints, but the largest by far was the map of New Hampshire pictured above. It comes in at just under 5 feet by 10 feet. Due to its scale, our department decided to purchase a vector map file from a vendor, so that we would have the option to edit it as needed, and then scale it up as large as we wanted without the image quality diminishing in any way.
The overall look and feel that we wanted to evoke was of a war room table map of a bygone era, such as that found in the Lascaris War Rooms, as you can see below.
Before I began adjusting the graphic, it looked like this, but as you can see in the photos above, those maps are fairly devoid of details, so I stripped most of it away, changed the palette to be more muted and earth toned, replaced all the fonts, and added the lettered quadrants. Then I started layering in the texture.
Once approved, we had it printed on a heavyweight matte paper, and then it was aged down by the Scenic department before being installed on set.
There were roughly a dozen other, much smaller, maps that were layered in, but those required only minimal adjustment before being ready to go to print.
Additionally, we needed some blueprints, and I was able to use the set designer's drawings as a basis for them.
