The Serenity is an important character in the series, and all of the department heads collaborated on its design. Production designer Carey Meyer began creating it with a series of thumbnail sketches, which were followed by refined drawings and then paper and clay models. "We went through 20 or so different phases of concept design," Meyer recalls. "We drew from a lot of comic-book art, Jules Verne imagery, and submarine and nautical influences." Whedon liked images from such movies as Alien, Brazil and Blade Runner, but he insisted that the Serenity feel different, and he again brought up Heaven’s Gate. "Those diametrically opposed images force you into a direction," Meyer attests. "It takes on a life of its own." The entire design and construction process – from thumbnails to shooting on set – took seven weeks.

The show’s visual-effects crew had to replicate Meyer’s ship in CG for shots of the exterior. Visual-effects supervisor Loni Peristere says the Serenity was designed to look as if it could actually function, not only in space but also in the atmosphere of the planets it visits. "It couldn’t just look good, it had to work," says Peristere. "We wanted to be fair to fans who understood aerodynamics." After doing experiments with particle dynamics, the effects team found that the ship would have to fly very fast and have lots of thrust to get off the ground. By designing side engines that would rotate, the visual-effects crew made it possible for the craft to work more like a helicopter when in a planet’s atmosphere, so that it could move in a more elegant way.

Color is also a very important element of the ship, and each area within it has a distinctive hue; the dining room is a soft yellow, while the hallways are blue and the engine room is red. Because of the layout of the sets, it’s often possible to see from one part of the ship into others, so breaking up the colors creates a greater sense of depth and helps viewers distinguish one space from the next. The décor of the ship is cluttered; as Whedon told set decorator David A. Koneff, the crew is like the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath. "People on the edge of space accumulate as many things as they can that make them feel as though they’re at home," Whedon theorizes.

Boyd and Meyer collaborated closely to create the built-in lighting on the Serenity. "We talked about how we could get light into those spaces, and what the person who designed the spaceship would put there," remembers Boyd. Because the ship has full ceilings and nowhere to conceal false lights, Meyer wanted to install as much perforated skin on the ship as he could so that surfaces could be backlit and the interior space would have some glow. Meyer found it difficult to create a spaceship skin that would allow hard light to pass through, but he didn’t want to force Boyd into a situation where all of the light coming though the walls would be diffused. The designer tested many different materials, and he ultimately used a lot of white conveyer-belt material. "It’s like the band of a wristwatch," says Meyer. "We’re able to paint it any color we want." The art department also used a lot of honeycomb-corrugated cardboard, which looks similar to the aluminum used on many aircraft.

Gaffer Dennis Peterson says that in some cases the crew has stripped traditional movie lights – such as fluorescent tubes and Cyc-Strips – of the attachments that make them recognizable. The stripped-down units are then installed into new fixtures. "You’re normally always trying to hide your sources, but on this show we’re not denying they’re there," says Peterson. He adds that the lights that shine through the ship's superstructure cast shadows of the craft's walkways and gratings. Because most of the lights are controlled by dimmers, he and Boyd can easily pick and choose among them to keep the look fresh.

The Serenity is a ship that's long past its prime, and Boyd and Peterson try to enhance that feeling with their lighting. "Nothing’s perfect on this spaceship," Boyd notes. "It hasn’t been tended to. It’s a tramp steamer on the frontiers of space." Light bulbs are aged with paint, Streaks ’n’ Tips, dirt and grunge, and some are unplugged so it looks as though they’ve burned out. Boyd mixes in as many types of sources as he can to map the various areas of the ship. He lit one episode mainly with Xenon flashlights and used old carbon-arc, film-premiere lights for a night battle sequence. Peterson says that while the show was being prepped, he and Boyd got into the dead storage of the Fox Lighting Department in search of old lights that had been put out to pasture. "It’s not traditional suit-and-tie lighting," says Peterson. "Our approach is very organic."

Boyd plays up that feel by molding his lighting with a very free hand. "I’m often running around with a flashlight and a bounce card, or a China ball. I’ll always try to set up light sources so that wherever people go, I can steal a return off that source. We’ve designed the lighting so that we can shoot in any direction at any time and still have the kind of effect lighting we need." He prefers that light fall on a character imperfectly, as if accidentally; he willingly allows six or seven stops overexposure, and as much as four stops underexposure.

Because Boyd has built so much lighting into the ship, and because he can push in complimentary lighting fast, the Firefly crew shoots around 55 setups a day, and as many as 68 with two cameras. "David lights faster than anyone I’ve worked with by a country mile," says Whedon, who adds that on past projects, he used to have time to schedule meetings or write between setups, but "now I can’t go anywhere." Steadman says that because the crew uses two cameras on seven of eight shooting days – and because they often have to use 400' loads to fit into the ship's confined areas – they churn through an astonishing number of mags. One day, he recalls, they established a record 50 reloads.