“Hush” was a challenging shoot for the “Buffy” cast, but it was arguably even harder on the crew. Making it appear as though the Gentlemen were hovering above the ground was no easy feat, achieved by the incredible special effects team. Wide shots required a rig with a track and a harness, while close-ups enlisted a crew member to push the actors around on a wheeled platform, Jones told TV Guide.
But the production team wasn’t the only ones kicked into high gear. The post-production crew, including composer Christophe Beck, were also in a mad dash to create a polished finished product.
“It was five days and nights,” he chimed in. “It was a lot of sleep deprivation to get this done … Even though it was physically and technically a little torturous, I was into it from beginning to end. There was also the feeling that among the crew, especially the post-production crew, that we were making something special here.”
In fact, even getting the episode off the ground was a struggle. The network feared that a soundless episode would fail to keep the audience’s attention, according to Jones. The episode also required an unprecedented amount of brief cutaway shots for narrative exposition that would cost the network precious time and money.
“When we produced this it was unlike anything we’d done,” Whedon said in a DVD extra behind-the-scenes featurette. “This, just this small thing, cut away to ‘small boy in a house somewhere’, to ‘an old man in a house somewhere’. These are all things you have to build the room or find it; you have to get the actor, you have to — they’re all things that you don’t do as much. We’ll light entire spaces in this and only use them for a few seconds, and in television, you just don’t have time to do that.”