Medicine Women (Maskihkiwêw) is an Indigenous supernatural drama created and written by Robert Slinn at Sinfull Studios, based in Regina, Saskatchewan. The series follows a young Cree woman who trains as a medicine woman after a devastating loss and hunts the creatures that cross from the spirit world into ours. The teaser is out now, and the response in the first few days tells us we are onto something.
Why Saskatchewan Is the Right Place to Shoot This Story
A lot of genre production runs to British Columbia or Ontario for the tax credits and the stage infrastructure. I understand that math. But Medicine Women is a story that lives on the Canadian prairie — in the frost, the open sky, the treelines that go nowhere and everywhere at once. Shooting in Saskatchewan is not a compromise. It is the point. When the Witiko moves through fog in the teaser, that fog is real Saskatchewan winter fog, and the silence underneath it is real too. You cannot manufacture that atmosphere on a stage in Burnaby. The landscape carries the weight of the story in a way that no production design budget can fully replicate.
How We Approached the Look
The visual language we were after was specific: frosted prairie, low light, the feeling that the world just past the tree line belongs to something else. We wanted the teaser to feel grounded and tactile — real coats, real breath, real cold — and then have the spirit-world elements push against that in a way that felt earned rather than imposed. The Witiko’s eyes in the fog were designed to be the one moment where the frame tips over into something you cannot explain away. Everything building toward that moment had to feel documentary-honest so that when the break came, it landed.
Color played a central role in holding that balance. The grade leans into the blue-silver tones that Saskatchewan winter light naturally gives you, with warmth pulled back to keep the prairie feeling inhospitable. Skin tones were protected carefully — the lead has to read as present and human even as the world around her goes strange.
The Gear and Disciplines That Came Together
Sinfull Studios runs on a genuine multi-discipline capability, and the teaser pulled from most of it. Cinematography, drone and aerial work, color, and sound design all had to function together as a single voice rather than as separate departments handing off files. Drone footage gave us the scale of the landscape — the way the prairie swallows a person — without ever making the scene feel like a geography lesson. The aerials establish isolation. Ground-level work establishes stakes.
Sound design on a project like this is not decorative. The spirit-world has to sound like something that does not belong to the physical world, and building that vocabulary from scratch — without leaning on horror-genre clichés that would flatten the cultural specificity — was real creative work. The teaser is where we started testing what that language sounds like.
Where Unreal Engine and Virtual Production Fit
Sinfull Studios has real Unreal Engine and virtual-production capability, and Medicine Women is one of the projects where that infrastructure becomes genuinely useful rather than just impressive to list. Spirit-world sequences — the crossings, the environments that exist between worlds — are places where in-camera virtual production gives you control over light and environment that location shooting cannot. You can design a space that has no real-world referent and still shoot actors into it with the light behaving honestly on their faces.
The teaser did not lean heavily on that pipeline — it was built to establish the grounded, prairie-real side of the series. But the architecture for those sequences is already part of how we are thinking about the full production. The two disciplines, location shooting and virtual production, are not in competition on this project. They serve different parts of the story’s world.
What Making the Teaser Confirmed
A teaser is a proof of concept as much as it is a piece of marketing. The questions we were answering were practical ones: Does this look hold up? Does the tone work? Can a small Saskatchewan studio pull the visual register this story requires? The answer we got back from the footage was yes — and the response since putting the teaser out, roughly 1,000 views in the first few days, suggests the story lands for an audience beyond the people already invested in the project.
What we confirmed most clearly is that the story and the setting reinforce each other. An Indigenous supernatural drama set on the Saskatchewan prairie does not have to explain itself. The place does the work.
Where the Series Goes from Here
Medicine Women is a series in active development. The Medicine Women series page carries the current information, and we will be updating it as the project moves forward. The teaser represents the visual and tonal foundation — the standard everything that follows has to meet or exceed. That is the bar we set for ourselves when we made it, and it is the bar we are building toward now.
Watch the teaser and follow the series on the Medicine Women page at Sinfull Studios.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where was the Medicine Women teaser filmed?
The Medicine Women teaser was filmed on location in Saskatchewan, Canada. Sinfull Studios, based in Regina, chose to shoot on the actual Saskatchewan prairie because the landscape — the frost, the open sky, the winter fog — is integral to the story rather than just a backdrop.
What production techniques did Sinfull Studios use to make the Medicine Women teaser?
The teaser combined ground-level cinematography, drone and aerial footage, color grading, and original sound design. Sinfull Studios also has Unreal Engine and virtual-production capability, which is being incorporated into the broader series for spirit-world sequences, though the teaser focused on location shooting to establish the grounded prairie look of the show.
Is Medicine Women based on Cree culture and tradition?
Medicine Women (Maskihkiwêw) is an Indigenous supernatural drama created and written by Robert Slinn at Sinfull Studios. The series follows a young Cree woman who trains as a medicine woman and hunts creatures that cross from the spirit world. The production is built around honoring the specificity of the story’s cultural setting, including the sound design and visual language, which were developed to avoid generic genre conventions.
