In The Neverending Story, Production Designer Collin Niemi didn't just design the usual rooms and houses needed for actors to perform in. He designed a whole other world for them. Called Fantasia, this magical land has forests and mountains, cities, villages and castles. It even has Flying Machines and dragons.

The most challenging design and construction job on The Neverending Story, according to Niemi, was the building of 10,000 sq. ft. of forests inside a studio.

"We built more than 100 trees of which many were 30 feet tall. We made the trunks and branches out of Styrofoam and painted them. We glued artificial lichens and vines on them. Then we brought in truckloads of artificial leaves and painstakingly attached them to the branches. We supplemented them with eight truckloads of artificial ferns, bushes, mosses and flowering plants. We also planted real coniferous trees. We covered the ground of the whole studio with 200 tons of earth and cedar chips," says Niemi.

Once the forest was planted - it had to be replanted and rearranged on a regular basis as the shooting of the series progressed. This was because the boy-hero of Fantasia, Atreyu, travels through various forests, from temperate climates to tropical.

Niemi's crew also built a rocky mountain with trails and precipitous cliffs - right in the studio.

"The mountain was built in concrete on a wood and steel frame. It had 3,000 sq. feet of horizontal surface and 8,000 sq. feet of various vertical cliffs," he explains.