Some things, you must get right. For Nick Williams, production designer of Black Hands, there was one thing he wanted to make as realistic as possible.
“The murders.
“The way the bodies were found, the way the bodies fell, I think we had to get that right. That was really important. The way Robin was lying, because there was a lot of evidence around that about how the gun had fallen and where the shell ended up.”
Set to premiere on November 1, the five-part Black Hands TV series is a spinoff of the podcast by the same name made for Stuff by journalist Martin van Beynen.
The podcast investigated the Bain family murders of 1994. Van Beynen described what police found that day as “a house of horrors”, five people were dead but the house itself was also starting to fall apart.
The teleseries version of Black Hands is a drama based on the actual murders, which makes it different from the documentary podcast. Series producer Robin Scholes says she wanted to tell the stories of the victims; mum Margaret, dad Robin, 19-year-old Arawa, 18-year-old Laniet and Stephen, 14.
News of the family has, for the most part, focused on their deaths and the trials to determine who was responsible for them. David Bain was convicted, jailed and then had his convictions quashed.
The mystery and the gruesome killings have riveted the country for more than 20 years. That is one reason why Williams, the set designer for this dramatic retelling, says they went to extraordinary lengths to get the details right.
His team pored over police evidence, family photographs and videotape to recreate the home as it would have been before and after the killings.
Williams admits it was a morbid task.
“This is not a happy story, it affects you on some level and you have to reconcile it with yourself,” he says.
“Then, when you see those images, it is very jarring. Some people did not want to look at them and the production was very respectful of that.”
His team pored over police evidence, family photographs and videotape to recreate the home as it would have been before and after the killings.
Williams admits it was a morbid task.
“This is not a happy story, it affects you on some level and you have to reconcile it with yourself,” he says.
“Then, when you see those images, it is very jarring. Some people did not want to look at them and the production was very respectful of that.”
As part of his research for Black Hands, van Beynen collected a trove of images and video from the crime scene but also from the Bain family’s journeys, holidays and of their everyday life. Photos of their house show a cluttered space.
He says that many would have described the house as dirty but you could also view the busy walls and piles of possessions as artefacts of a full life.
“It might have been a mess but it was an interesting mess,” van Beynen says. The family had lived in Papua New Guinea and filled their Dunedin home with collections from their time abroad.
But some rooms were so packed with things that it was difficult to remove the bodies without clearing a path.
As a set designer, Williams says they wanted to portray the personalities of the family but did not need to – and feasibly could not – create a set as cluttered as the Bain house was.
“We wanted to make it as realistic and as close to the house as we possibly could. We wanted to be true to those characters, who, we must remember, are real life victims of a horrible crime,” he says.
It took nine weeks in total to create the set. The interior was built in a warehouse in Auckland and they found a house, also in Auckland, to film outside.
Knick-knacks, furniture and even a near replica car were sourced from across New Zealand. They even got a goat and attempted to replicate the caravan which Robin had been living in at the time of the shooting.
They analysed photos from the victims’ rooms to recreate family photos. Williams says this was an important part of giving a true representation of the family.
“In Arawa’s bedroom, for example, on her bedroom door she had slogans that she had drawn on. We managed to zoom in on that photo, blow it up, get it into a negative image, and then we could read what was written on it,” he says.
His team then recreated the graffiti style door and held a photo shoot to re-enact ball photos Arawa had in her bedroom.
They have not created an exact replica of the Bain house and the producers of the programme say this is not a whodunit or an investigative exposé on the case. Although Williams says they did pay particular attention to the way the bodies were found lying on the floor, to the gun, and how the bodies fell.
Those who worked on the programme say it is first and foremost about the people.
They describe it as a sort of homage to the victims but there is no hiding that this is a production about a grisly crime that shocked and transfixed the country.
That is what they were trying to recreate for television.
