[CLIP] Nick and Vanessa Lachey: The pods are now open.

[lively music playing]

[people cheer, chatter and laugh] 

Dave Edwards: The pods are open, thanks to me. I’m Dave Edwards, production designer for Love Is Blind, and we’re going to go on a journey to look at the set. This season, one of the things that we all were looking at, collectively, is to change the pods.

[CLIP] Alex: No way. 

[CLIP] Meg: Ooh, this is a pretty pod! 

Dave Edwards: It all goes back to that connection of the experiment. We don’t want a huge difference between the two, so when you look at the men’s versus the women’s, it takes you out of the moment. We wanted it to be very familiar, very comfortable. The difference between the two pods is they’re mirror images. Welcome to the men’s pod. Here we are in women’s hero pod. Very subtle differences are in the set dressing. Black lamps. We have a bit of a terrarium in here. Notice that we don’t have the roses, the plants. It’s a little more masculine in terms of set dec. Prior to this season, the couches between the two were always very different. Now, I think many seasons in, we purposely went to the same curvilinear, nice, comfortable couch. We basically researched, researched, found the perfect couch. It was the wrong size and wouldn’t be available to us in time for this season. And so, we decided to build all 20 couches.

[record needle scratch]

[CLIP] Tiera: What?!

[CLIP] David: What?!

[CLIP] Tiera: What's wrong with you?

[David chuckles]

Dave Edwards: Early on in the design, we wanted to incorporate red in terms of that feeling of love, in terms of what you see in weddings. We wanted to incorporate that red runner, what we call sometimes “the Muppet,” the shag, kind of red carpet that really connects the two pods as they feel the essence of each other through the frozen window. You'll notice that there’s a window here all along the side. This is what we call a hero pod. The window on the side allows the director to pan all the way from side to side to be able to get the participants from any angle that works best for that moment. We give the cameras a lot of things to play with in terms of the window here. We have the fairy lights, and we give them lots of see-through elements, opaque elements in terms of glasses of different kinds. Some of the connective tissue in terms of cinematography and in terms of direction is that foreground. So you can see a little bit of movement but your eye just goes past it. One of the important things for these rooms is they're soundproof. Everything goes back to this experiment, and everything goes back to the connection between the two people. And so the only two speakers that we have are next to the frozen wall. 

[CLIP] Taylor: You're right there but you’re not. [chuckles]

[CLIP] Daniel: I know, I know. I, like, want to sit as close to the orange screen. 

[CLIP] Taylor: I know. I feel this weird desire to go through the wall. 

Dave Edwards: Our director had this idea that he wanted to fly over all the pods to see them. Not only the connection between those two participants dating, but to be able to see all the participants in there at any given time and be able to fly over and zoom in.

[CLIP] Alex: Let’s do something.

[CLIP] Madison: What do you want to do?

[CLIP] Alex: Lay on the couch.

[CLIP] Madison: Okay.

[CLIP] Alex: I’ll do it with you.

[Madison giggles]

[CLIP] Alex: Are you looking upwards? 

Dave Edwards: The idea was having the ceiling up there and gazing into, not the stars, but gazing up into blackness rather than an actual ceiling up there, made the room feel taller than it actually is, and also made it feel like it went to infinity up above as they were meeting each other and connecting philosophically and through love.

[CLIP] Alex: Madison, you are pretty cool. 

[CLIP] Madison: Thank you. I think you’re cool too. 

Dave Edwards: Thanks for coming on our journey. It’s been fun showing you a bit about Love Is Blind and the design process and everything we go through every season we play with this show.