Perspective 2014 jul aug by Rosa Negra

PERSPECTIVE J O U R N A L

O F

T H E

A R T

D I R E C T O R S

G U I L D

JULY – AUGUST 2014

-C

T H E

US $8.00

PRODUCTION DESIGN FILMMAKERS AND STORYTELLERS COME FROM ARCHITECTURE, F I N E A R T S A N D T H E AT R E CURRENTLY ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR FALL 2014 SOME OF OUR PRODUCTION DESIGN ALUMNI TODD CHERNIAWSKY (AFI CLASS OF 1993) OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (SUPERVISING ART DIRECTOR), ALICE IN WONDERLAND (ART DIRECTOR), AVATAR (SUPERVISING ART DIRECTOR), ZERO DARK THIRTY (ART DIRECTOR: HELICOPTER) KEITH CUNNINGHAM (AFI CLASS OF 1990) ENOUGH SAID (PRODUCTION DESIGNER) BRIDESMAIDS, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, STAR TREK (ART DIRECTOR) JOSEPH GARRITY (AFI CLASS OF 1979) FAMILY TREE, SUNSHINE CLEANING, BEST IN SHOW, MY GIRL (PRODUCTION DESIGNER) SHARON SEYMOUR (AFI CLASS OF 1984) OLDBOY, ARGO, THE IDES OF MARCH, THE TOWN (PRODUCTION DESIGNER)

AFI.edu American Film Institute educates the next generation of filmmakers through its prestigious AFI Conser vator y. Production Design graduates receive an MFA or a Certificate of Completion.

contents

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Visual development and concept art

Remembering Babylon 5

A classic from twenty years ago

Third Person

Approaching design for the enigmatic

Kickstarting Veronica Mars

Will crowdsourcing replace the studios?

Your Money Or Your Life

The mob gets robbed in Ozone Park

Comic Book Art

Created by Art Directors Guild members

Rodney Fuentebella, Concept Illustrator

John Iacovelli, Production Designer

Laurence Bennett, Production Designer

Jeff Schoen, Production Designer

Carlos A. Menendez, Production Designer

E D I TO R I A L

4 C O N T R I B U TO R S 7

FROM THE PRESIDENT

8 NEWS 58

PRODUCTION DESIGN

60 MEMBERSHIP 61 C A L E N DA R 6 2 M I L E S TO N E S

ON THE COVER:

Concept Illustrator Rodney Fuentebella worked almost entirely in Photoshop ® on this keyframe image for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Peter Wenham, Production Designer). Mr. Fuentebella tried with his digital brushwork and painterly style to convey a sense of life and drama to the illustration and help sell the moment to the film’s two directors and the other filmmakers.

6 4 R E S H O OT S PERSPECTIVE | J ULY /AUGUS T 2014

P ER S P ECT IV E T H E J O U R N A L O F T H E A RT D I R E C TO R S G U I L D

July/Aug u st 2014

PERSPECTIVE ISSN: 1935-4371, No. 54, © 2014. Published bimonthly by the Art Directors Guild, Local 800, IATSE, 11969 Ventura Blvd., Second Floor, Studio City, CA 91604-2619. Telephone 818 762 9995. Fax 818 762 9997. Periodicals postage paid at North Hollywood, CA, and at other cities.

Editor MICHAEL BAUGH editor.perspective@att.net Copy Editor MIKE CHAPMAN mike@IngleDodd.com Print Production INGLE DODD MEDIA 310 207 4410 inquiry@IngleDodd.com

BOARD OF DIRECTORS MIMI GRAMATKY, President JIM WALLIS, Vice President STEPHEN BERGER, Trustee CASEY BERNAY, Trustee

Advertising DAN DODD 310 207 4410 ex. 236 advertising@IngleDodd.com Publicity MURRAY WEISSMAN Weissman/Markovitz Communications 818 760 8995 murray@publicity4all.com

JUDY COSGROVE, Secretary cate bangs, Treasurer MARJO BERNAY, Trustee PAUL SHEPPECK, Trustee

SCOTT BAKER NORM NEWBERRY PATRICK DEGREVE RICK NICHOL MICHAEL DENERING DENIS OLSEN COREY KAPLAN JOHN SHAFFNER GAVIN KOON TIM WILCOX ADOLFO MARTINEZ TOM WILKINS SCOTT ROTH, Executive Director JOHN MOFFITT, Associate Executive Director GENE ALLEN, Executive Director Emeritus

Subscriptions: $32 of each Art Directors Guild member’s annual dues is allocated for a subscription to PERSPECTIVE. Non-members may purchase an annual subscription for $40 (overseas postage will be added for foreign subscriptions). Single copies are $8 each. Postmaster: Send address changes to PERSPECTIVE, Art Directors Guild, 11969 Ventura Blvd., Second Floor, Studio City, CA 91604-2619. Submissions: Articles, letters, milestones, bulletin board items, etc. should be emailed to the ADG office at perspective@artdirectors.org or send us a disk, or fax us a typed hard copy, or send us something by snail mail at the address above. Or walk it into the office— we don’t care. Website: w w w.artdirectors.org Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in PERSPECTIVE, including those of officers and staff of the ADG and editors of this publication, are solely those of the authors of the material and should not be construed to be in any way the official position of Local 800 or of the IATSE.

THE ART DIRECTORS GUILD MEMBE RSHIP INC LUDES PRODUCTION DESIGNERS, ART DIRECTORS, SCENIC ARTISTS, GRAPHIC ARTISTS, TITLE ARTISTS, ILLUSTRATORS, MATTE ARTISTS, SET DESIGNERS, MODEL MAKERS, AND DIGITAL ARTISTS

P ER S P E C T I V E | JU LY /AU G U S T 2014

editorial

ARTISTS OF THE MOVING IMAGE by Michael Baugh, Editor

Motion pictures used to be motion pictures...movies...film...cinema. The medium was understood by professionals and the public alike to be live-action performances recorded on strips of plastic similar to that used in home photography, and projected with light on a sheet of something large and white. Professionals who worked in the field used job descriptions reflecting that common understanding: cinematographer, screenwriter, movie actress. Today, those common perceptions have been redirected, like so much in our lives, into digital technologies. We still talk about shooting a film (old habits die slowly), but actual photographic film is hard to find on most soundstages these days—not in the digital cameras of publicity still photographers, not in the toolboxes of makeup artists and on-set dressers (replaced in many cases by cellphone cameras), and certainly not in the sleek, unobtrusive black boxes with logos on the side that say RED or Sony or Panavision. Almost from the beginning, traditional film production branched out to a wider range of technologies such as cel animation (Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse in 1922) and stop-motion puppets (Willis O’Brien, The Lost World, 1925). Television, which began broadcasting purely live performances, switched to recording its moving images when NBC’s Truth or Consequences (1957) became the first program sent to all time zones from a prerecorded videotape. Today, digital new media production, motion graphics and 3-D animation are sent to us continually by landline, satellite and wireless phones. Motion pictures are now often called moving images, and they come to us in a profuse mix of formats. One job that is common throughout all of this history, and in all of these technologies, is the visualizer—the artist who first imagines and communicates what the final moving image will actually look like. The role of the writer, of course, is primary in any scripted and (as an uncomfortable fact) much unscripted entertainment. We all know, “If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.” But the page is usually just words, black-and-white type, and movies are essentially a visual art form. A director can articulate a vision for the film, but again that vision is often expressed in words, suggestions for research and inspiration. In every case, some artist needs to translate those words into images, to imagine what the environments and backgrounds will look like, and to plan how the performers will move and appear in those environments. Studies in the history and criticism of movies have to explore more than production technologies and narrative genres. Cultural literacy requires an understanding of how and why films look the way they do, an appreciation of the artists who first render a story into images, and the influences and techniques that inform those renditions. The pages of PERSPECTIVE are a good place to start, filled with the gathered wisdom and experiences of the world’s preeminent visualizers. When you ask the question, “If this broad assortment of entertainment constitutes the Art of the Moving Image, who then are its artists?” Nearly all entertainment is highly collaborative, but the artists who actually take the written word and make the story visible—before any camera has rolled—are the Production Designers, Illustrators, Previsualization Artists, Set Designers, Scenic Artists and dozens of other designers, painters and visual inventors of the Art Directors Guild. PERSPECTIVE | J ULY /AUGUS T 2014

contributors LAURENCE BENNETT has a love of storytelling: reading stories, hearing them told, watching them. And loves being part of telling stories through the art that most inspires him: cinema. He was awarded a César and received Oscar® and BAFTA nominations for his work on The Artist, and ADG nominations for it and for Crash. He was honored to have been asked to create a poster commemorating the 75th anniversary of Cinecittà. Mr. Bennett was educated at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and Waseda University, Tokyo. After a stint in VISTA, he moved to Ireland for ten years before returning to Los Angeles to work in film. In Dublin, he had a design practice, worked in fringe theatre, exhibited his paintings, and was a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design. He and his wife Nina share their 1904 farmhouse in northwest Oregon, its orchards and gardens, with a variety of animals. They watch a lot of movies. The dog, who insists on barking at animals onscreen, is especially fond of Westerns. Concept Artist RODNEY FUENTEBELLA has degrees in design from UCLA and product design from the Art Center College in Pasadena. He grew up the youngest of six children, having immigrated with his family from the Philippines to their new home in South San Francisco. He has worked on various projects for Electronic Arts, Atari, DreamWorks Animation and WIRED magazine. In film, Mr. Fuentebella worked as a Concept Artist at Rhythm & Hues before joining the visual development team at Marvel Studios. He has created key-art illustrations and character designs for Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron and other Marvel Studios films. He has taught environment design at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena and currently lives in Los Angeles with his family.

A graduate of New York University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, JOHN IACOVELLI was born in Reno, and studied with Oliver Smith, John Conklin and Stephen Hendrickson at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has designed for the Pasadena Playhouse, the American Conservatory Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, and South Coast Repertory, among others. He received an Emmy® for the A&E broadcast of his design for the Broadway show Peter Pan, starring Cathy Rigby. He was nominated for an Art Directors Guild Award for his Production Design of Babylon 5, and he has received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Lifetime Achievement. Mr. Iacovelli is on the design faculty, Department of Theatre & Dance, University of California, Davis, and was a visiting professor at the Shanghai Drama Academy. He lives in Atwater Village in Los Angeles, and he is proud of his students who have become successful Set Designers, Art Directors and Production Designers. CARLOS MENENDEZ was born in Havana, Cuba, received a bachelor of architecture from the University of Texas at Austin and joined the New York architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, where he worked as an architect on buildings such as ABC Corporate Headquarters and the IBM Headquarters in Montreal. Menendez began designing sets in the early 1990s, starting as Art Director on South Beach. Since then, he has worked as the Production Designer on Stopping Power, Love Wedding Marriage, Rob the Mob and Alive Alone as well as Art Director and Set Designer on The Dictator, Larry Crowne, Miami Vice, The Lost City, Any Given Sunday, Analyze This, The Horse Whisperer, Wild Things, Speed 2, Ransom and Bad Boys. He has designed award-winning commercials in South America, Europe and Southeast Asia, and has received ADG nominations for Capital One and Macy’s. JEFF SCHOEN grew up in Minnesota and attended Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He traveled extensively throughout Europe and northern Africa working within the alternative art scene of the early 1980s. To fund his art habit, Mr. Schoen founded the set company, Harmony Scenic, and through it worked as an Art Director on more than 1,200 commercials and film projects, including North Country where he met his mentor and friend Richard Hoover. Together, they teamed up on the HBO shows, Enlightened and The Newsroom. Schoen considers it a gift to have had the chance to work on Robert Altman’s final film A Prairie Home Companion with Production Designer Dina Goldman. He currently splits his time between Venice, California, and his farm outside Minneapolis called No Harm Farm, a non-domestic animal rescue and sanctuary. There he raises his two daughters with his wife, artist Judy Kepes.

P ER S P E C T I V E | JU LY /AU G U S T 2014

*APR = Annual Percentage Rate. 1.69% APR is the preferred rate for new vehicles up to 48 months at a monthly payment of approximately $21.57 per $1,000 borrowed. Additional rates, starting as low as 1.95% APR, and terms may apply, call 888-800-3328 for details. Rate of 1.69% APR is also the preferred rate for used (maximum age 6 years old) vehicles up to 48 months at a monthly payment of approximately $21.57 per $1,000 borrowed. Amount financed may not exceed the MSRP or 120% of the high Kelley Blue Book NADA value for new (120% for used), including tax, license, GAP Insurance and Mechanical Breakdown Protection. 2% cash back rebate offer applies for loans of $5,000 or greater. Maximum cash back per loan is $200. Loan must have a minimum term of 18 months. Loans paid off in less than 18 months will have rebate added back to principal at time of payoff. Rates are subject to change without notice. No additional discounts may be applied to these rates. All loans subject to credit approval. Existing First Entertainment auto loans may not be refinanced under the terms of this offer. Offer expires July 31st, 2014.

Hollywood Center Studios SOUND STAGES • CREATIVE OFFICE SPACE • HD CONTROL ROOMS

Space for Big Ideas!

LA’s Premier Production Facility for Feature Film, Commercial & Television Productions.

Call for a quote today! 323-860-0000 1040 North Las Palmas Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038 Info@HollywoodCenter.com www.HollywoodCenter.com 6

P ER S P E C T I V E | JU LY /AU G U S T 2014

from the president

DIVERSITY by Mimi Gramatky, Art Directors Guild President

It is said that superheroes and action heroes tend to reflect the era which they inhabit. I certainly learned that while researching the Visual History of Superman (PERSPECTIVE – July 2012). Superman moved from the black-and-white days of his inception when he sported a form-fitting wool knit shirt, tights and shorts to his modern version, the full-color, hard-bodied Man of Steel we saw in Henry Cavill’s incarnation. As Josie Jammet pointed out in The New York Times (March 2, 2014), “There are now more indistinguishable, barrel-chested, eight-packed aspiring stars than ever, and they’re all hoping to become the next Hemsworth or Cavill.” You can find them working out at Gold’s Gym, all Caucasian males named Joe or Josh. Nikki Finke, past editor of Deadline.com, describes the modern superhero casting process as a “bake-off.” So if these characters really do reflect our era, where is the ethnic, gender and cultural diversity that we expect today? When the ADG co-sponsored Eagle-Con, California State University at Los Angeles’ foray into a science fiction convention, I learned how limited diversity has been in the world of superheroes and action heroes. There are those who still consider themselves traditionalists, resistant to changes in superheroes, while others—mostly emerging artists—embrace 21st century possibilities including LGBT characters. DC and Marvel still exercise financial control over successful superheroes, but these younger artists may be affecting change in some of the decisions made by the comic book conglomerates. Casting Idris Elba to play a Norse god in Thor, and Laurence Fishburne to play the traditionally white role, Perry White, in Man of Steel, may have caused a social media frenzy, neither role needed to be defined by its race and each performance honored the essence of its character. Perhaps Marvel was influenced by Donald Glover wanting to play a black version of Spider-Man when they made the decision to reboot Spider-Man as half-black/half-Latino in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book.

Below: In a joint press conference with Netflix, Marvel and the state of New York, the Walt Disney Company’s Robert Iger announces that liveaction television series based on DAREDEVIL, JESSICA JONES, LUKE CAGE, IRON FIST and the team-up series THE DEFENDERS will all shoot in New York City. Based on favorable tax breaks which lured the projects to the area, the 60 one-hour episodes will mean $200 million in production spending, 400 full-time jobs and 9,000 short-term production jobs. Netflix expects to begin airing the Marvel projects in 2015.

At the end of his announcement of the three-year commitment from Disney, Marvel and Netflix to shoot four thirteen-episode series, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage, and a miniseries re-imagining the dream team The Defenders in Manhattan, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo remarked, “There’s a sequel here, I can see it: boy from Queens goes to Albany to fight the evil empire and bring justice to the people of the state.” Wasn’t Peter Parker, now redefined as halfblack/half-Latino, originally a wimpy kid from Queens? Hailing from that borough which has one of the most diverse demographics in the country, the character could be of any ethnic or cultural origin or any gender. So why not a Puerto Rican female, or a better yet, a transgender African-American? Imagine what fun it would be to transform those characters’ written stories into physical environments, allowing the viewer to suspend belief and be transported to their worlds. PERSPECTIVE | J ULY /AUGUS T 2014

news SKETCHUP 3D BASECAMP 2014 by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team

In mid-April, SketchUp® enthusiasts, professionals, developers…heck, friends from across the globe gathered in snowy Vail, Colorado, for 3D Basecamp 2014. After braving a major snowstorm on the drive to Vail, intrepid Basecampers jumped straight into morning training sessions to sharpen their SketchUp skills. The official festivities kicked off in the afternoon with the 3D Basecamp Welcome Address and Keynote. After the team at Trimble poked around SketchUp’s history and future, it introduced the company’s first tablet product, the SketchUp Mobile Viewer for iPad. For the Keynote, Nick Ierodiaconou, co-founder at WikiHouse and OpenDesk in London, discussed roles for open source and design in helping solve some big problems out there in the world. At SketchUp, we’re geeks for design thinking, and we’re inspired by the act of making. After the general session, the real work of Basecamp commenced. Twenty presenters, over forty sessions, explored architectural visualization, construction documentation, the business of 3D printing, virtual reality, modeling for courtroom presentations or ancient history research, and so much more. It’s amazing what happens when great SketchUp minds come together. But don’t take my word for it: watch the presentations from 3D Basecamp 2014 on YouTube now, and see for yourself. The presenters were brilliant and generous with their knowledge. They’re also great pals who’ve been part of our SketchUp family for some time now. It was great to see everyone, even if there was hardly enough time to catch up between sessions. We met a lot of new friends in Vail too: Christina Eneroth from Sweden, who has dreamed some incredibly useful extensions. Our Twitter pals at PGAV Destinations, who design whale shark tanks for a living (Seriously?). The folks at Skalp, who are working on a delicious tool for supercharging SketchUp sections. And many, many more folks who shared their fascinating projects and modeling methods. On Monday night, this cross section of the SketchUp universe collided at the Vail Cascade for the Basecamp party. Basecampers managed the altitude (mostly) just fine, and after the party, settled in for another two days of presentations, workshops and great times. 3D Basecamp 2014 was one of the best yet, and you can bet it won’t be our last. To keep tabs on when and where our next Basecamp will be, add your name to the 3D Basecamp Notification List. We’ll keep you in the loop, and hope to see you in the hot tub next time.

Scan to view the Basecamp on YouTube (or search youtube.com for 3D Basecamp) Scan to add your name to the list (or link from sketchupdate.blogspot.com)

P ER S P E C T I V E | JU LY /AU G U S T 2014

Creating Interior & Exterior Sets and Props

PERSPECTIVE | J ULY /AUGUS T 2014

Captain America:

The Winter Soldier Art and comments by Rodney Fuentebella, Concept Illustrator PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Previous pages: Concept Illustrator Rodney Fuentebella’s Photoshop® drawing of Falcon catching Captain America after he has fallen from the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. For the image, Mr. Fuentebella did a couple of gray-scale drawings in Photoshop to make sure the pose and the framing worked. The characters and the ships were already designed at this point, but he did research by having his fellow co-workers pose and by using Modo® to create reference models. This page: In this sequence, painted in Photoshop, Mr. Fuentebella shows Captain America taking down a quinjet while S.H.I.E.L.D. is chasing him.

PERSPECTIVE

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Top: Mr. Fuentebella writes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is the final battle as an enemy quinjet is chasing Falcon. I wanted to make sure that the epic scale of the firefight is visceral and captures the excitement of the film. I created some rough drawings from references I received of the helicarriers and quinjet and from the previs. I did a rough thumbnail painting in Photoshop and then created a layout with cars and the stretch of highway in Modo. From there, I painted the rest of the scene in Photoshop.â&#x20AC;?

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Above, left to right: “The final battle as two helicarriers destroy each other. I researched a lot of battles between ships at sea and in the air to capture the moment.” “I used reference of the Triskelion design from the Art Department to help me figure out how the scene would look when Captain America jumps from the glass elevator to the atrium below.” “For Captain America’s final battle against some enemy agents on one of the helicarriers, I was inspired by multi-figure compositions from painters like Caravaggio and Dean Cornwell.” “This last illustration is one of my favorites for the film. I did a lot of rough thumbnails trying to figure the best way to depict this scene, and finally came up with a viewpoint from a security camera. After some initial sketches, I mocked up rigged figures in Modo to figure out the layout and then painted the scene in Photoshop.” PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Opposite, top: “This scene is the chaotic highway battle between Black Widow and the Winter Soldier. I did a rough thumbnail painting and then created a layout with cars and the stretch of highway in Modo. From there, I painted the rest of the scene in Photoshop.” Bottom: “This scene, part of the same sequence, depicts the Highway battle between Steve Rogers and the Winter Soldier, painted the same way.” Left: “This is a sequence in the last act as Captain America falls from the helicarrier after battling the Winter Soldier. I wanted to show him slowly sinking deeper into the water and unconsciousness. I sketched out a few simple black-and-white images in Photoshop, and then finished them all in Photoshop as well.”

JU LY /AUGUS T 2014

babylon by John Iacovelli, Production Designer

June, 1989. I was there in the beginning. In his production offices at the new Television Academy office building in North Hollywood, Joe Straczynski had just told a few people the ending of his new science fiction series. For the next seven years, the five of us in that room were the only people who knew what the ending of Babylon 5 would be. Gathered that day, in addition to writer/creator/executive producer J. Michael Straczynski, were executive producer Doug Netter, producer John Copeland, visual effects supervisor Ron Thornton, and me. Unlike the others, I wasn’t really a sci-fi geek...but who didn’t love the look of the original Star Trek. I knew how to create scenery. I could design a television show. But this was all new territory to me. I had to learn a new language.

Opposite page, top: Fan art of the BABYLON 5 station by Jerris Hof of Boulder, CO. Designed as the “last, best hope for peace,” the station is home to 250,000, including about 100,000 humans and 2,000 EarthForce personnel, and includes areas for businesses, residences and recreation. The design of the station was based on Gerard O’Neill’s cylinder and was further developed by visual effects supervisor Ron Thornton. Bottom, left: A pencil and technical pen sketch by Concept Designer Timothy Earls of the mag-lev tube car for the series CRUSADE. Only a small part of the car was built; the rest, and the tunnel, was created with CGI.

Two months earlier, I found myself in Panama City Beach, Florida, the Production Designer on a low-budget film. Ruby in Paradise was written and directed by Victor Nunez. It starred Ashley Judd in her film debut. That evening, I was in a fleabag motel reading the first script for the two-hour pilot, called “The Gathering.” John Copeland had asked me to read it and come up with some notes. I thought it was good—in fact, very good—but I felt Straczynski was holding something back. We got on a conference call. I told him not to worry about the sets too much, just tell his story and we would figure out how to do it. I wanted him to raise the stakes at the end. I said, “The whole universe should be about to go to war.” This became the design philosophy: Do what Straczynski writes. The problem was not where to get the money and the time to have crisp clean panels like the Enterprise or Death Star sets. My consuming problem was how to hide staple holes. I overcame this, in the end, by the use of theatrical painting techniques: scumbling, spattering, dry-brushing. It gave the show this kind of artists’ palette look, and made things look aged and worn. Solutions like that really determined the look of the show. I also felt that things could be ugly. Neither Ron Thornton nor I were afraid to do ugly space ships in CGI. Ugly interiors. My reasoning was that if you looked at the inside of the space shuttle, it was not pretty. Functional is not pretty. Ron and his team (including visual effects producer Shannon Casey) won Emmys® for the visual effects on the pilot. The Star Trek shows were still using model ships. Our space battles were all in the digital realm.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Above, right: Another pencil and technical pen sketch by Mr. Earls of the White Star in the Babylon 5 launch bay. Mr. Iacovelli writes, “I normally describe the White Star as the crew’s fighting frigate. When it was first introduced in the third season, it wasn’t supposed to be fully online, which was great because it allowed us to refine and develop the ship as we went along. If you watch the episodes, you’ll see that we gradually made the interior darker, which I think is much more dramatic.” PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

I had already learned a little bit about visual effects. After coming off a job as the assistant to Garvin Eddy on The Cosby Show, the number one-rated show on television, I went to Mexico with Gregg Fonseca as the Art Director on Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This film gave me insight into how to set up special effects shots. How to make it all work together. What needs to be real and what doesn’t? Babylon 5 started non-union. Like almost everyone I knew, I had been blocked from joining Local 876, even with credits like those above. By the third season, the show was organized. We got a lot of good talent into the Guild, many who have continued to have major credits: Doug Meerdink, Mark-Louis Walters, Jason Howard, Daniel Saks, Roland Rosenkranz and Tim Earls, to name a few. It started in one warehouse in Sun Valley, CA. Three soundstages were built that are still in use today; two other buildings were then annexed. At the end of the five-year story arc, we had done four television movies, 110 episodes, and had over 365 sets. I remember several directors came to us from the various Trek series. They always loved the fact that there was so much color on the show. The use of color was new in a bold way for sci-fi television at the time. Ann Bruice, the costume designer, and I came up with a palette we called “spicy brights.” In addition, the grips could wild out any wall, any set could be turned into any other. I remember how impressed director Jesus Trevino was that the central marketplace was called The Zocalo. This name came from my time in Mexico City. The script originally called this set The Galleria, and all I could think of when I read that was the Sherman Oaks Galleria; so I asked Straczynski if we could change it. He said, “Send me a list.” Zocalo was the name he chose. Straczynski ‘s attention to science-fact has always guided the show. The show really tried to hold up a lot of science credibility. Later in the series, and on the spinoff called Crusade, a team of scientists and engineers from JPL in Pasadena were retained to consult on the science to try to get it right. Or more right. Straczynski directed me to a book called The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by G.K. O’Neill. It is all about life on permanently inhabited space stations. I drew many ideas from that. The show was influenced by the Art Direction in the films 2001, Blade Runner, Forbidden Planet and Brazil. Those films are science fiction icons. Designer eye-candy. A diverse range of architecture influenced the show. I drew from the work a number of deconstructivist architects. In fact, Frank Gehry’s eldest son’s first

Opposite page, clockwise from top left: The casino was a primary set in the pilot with this mural based on the March of Progress art from the WPA in the 1930s; the CNC observation dome, an elevated set with no command chair, was one of the few sets with an integrated window matching the exterior CGI version of the station; Earharts is kind of like Babylon 5’s nightclub, based on a mini-aircraft (producer John Copeland’s grandfather was in the RAF and he’s a nut about World War II flying stuff); at the end of the second season, the Med-lab was dismantled to make room for a bigger Tea Garden, and the set was completely revamped; Mr. Iacovelli writes, “I really like the Zocalo, but I do think we see too much of it as a set—you can sense the layout of the soundstage. I’m trying to suggest that Babylon 5 is not only as big as our soundstages; Joe, John and I know that it’s much bigger”; the Dugout was a bar for the crew of the space station with a sports theme and murals made from boxing paintings; the war room with its large map of the universe and exterior view of the station was designed to evoke many classic movies from DR. STRANGELOVE to WAR GAMES—the center table was under-lit to put transparencies on and mimic future touch technology. This page, above: Two pencil and technical pen sketches by Timothy Earls of the conduit junction wall section and the addition to the corridor showing how much more advanced the detailing of the interchangeable station walls were for the Excalibur on the Babylon 5 spinoff called CRUSADE. PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Right: Mr. Earls’ sketch of Garibaldi’s Life Pod, a small set made from ribbed MDF pieces shot against black duvetyne. Opposite page, top: Mr. Earls’ drawing of the entrance to the dark tower for the BABYLON 5 spinoff CRUSADE; you can see the dark line where the CGI set extension begins. If nothing else, Babylon 5 pioneered the use of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) to create epic sets far bigger than the show’s soundstages. A portable Quonset shelter, again drawn by Mr. Earls, shows the integration of the set and CGI, filmed against a green screen with only a physical deck and canvas-covered hut (designed to be used often but only shot once). Bottom: The graphics were sophisticated from the start, but moved to a higher level when Alan Kobayashi joined the show in season 3. Graphic designer Cathy Coltas executed the Zocalo shopping bag label. A few custom bags were the large blue ones from Ikea. Universe Today coincided with the Art Department getting a wide-format printer which allowed 13x19 newspapers to be printed in house. The show’s family of fonts, human and alien, (only two are shown here) were used during the entire run. A very early Adobe® program called Dimensions allowed the creation of a vector line space station model which could be scaled up without jaggy lines. EarthForce Post Office labels were printed on dye sub paper and glued to crates and packages. Color Xerox technology dropped the cost in later seasons, but either way they were all hand cut. By the fourth season, the inkjet printing had advanced enough so artwork could be printed on acetate and mounted to a piece of clear plexi to be built into a desktop.

job was working for me. One summer, he built white models for Babylon 5. I believe the reason the look of the show is admired is that we went to so many different

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

places, both on the station and off. I created an eclectic design esthetic for this show based on the fact that architecture is cumulative, not exclusionary.

Earth Force / STOP font Earth Force / STOP font

Minbari Pictogram Minbari Pictogram

Narn Narn Pakmara

Pakmara Pakmara

Drazi

Drazi Drazi

One of the sets I am the most proud of is a set we called the sanctuary. The script called for the character G’Kar to perform a religious ceremony in his quarters. It seemed claustrophobic and wrong to me. I had a gut feeling that I needed to trust the theatertrained dramaturg in me. I went into Straczynski’s office and I said, “I think this scene should feel like grand opera.” I told him the set should have a huge window. We should see the station and the stars revolving.” John Copeland interrupted and told me we were out of money for new sets and that we couldn’t afford this. I told him I knew there was still money for CGI, right? He said yes. So I said, “Let’s make a simple set. We will get a piece of carpet, paint the design of an astrolabe on it. We will put low back-lit walls in a circle and play it all against a green screen. They can fill in the rest of the architecture in post.” No one was doing this kind of virtual set then. It was so successful we used it in almost every subsequent episode. It also opened the door for us to do a lot more virtual sets. Years ago, I said in a magazine article: “In twenty years, I hope it looks as fresh as when I see Star Trek and Star Wars now. For me, Star Wars is the definitive version of the genre. When I look at the sets today, they still look great. So I would love someone to see a rerun of Babylon 5 in twenty years’ time and say, ‘Hey, that looks great!’” Twenty years have now passed. I still think it looks great. ADG

BABYLON 5 – 1994-1998 John Iacovelli, Production Designer Roland Rosenkranz, Mark-Louis Walters, Deborah Raymond, Dorian Vernacchio, Art Directors Kevin Morrissey, Doug Meerdink, Julie Allardice, Christopher Muller, Assistant Art Directors Timothy M. Earls, John Eaves, Luc Mayrand, Concept Designers Alan Kobayashi, Cathy Coltas, Ted Haigh, Doreen Austria, Graphic Artists Brian Murray, Mark Hurtado, Storyboard Artists Karl J. Martin, Jim Wallis, Al Hobbs, Set Designers Alejandro Gehry, Model Maker Rory Duval, Tamlyn Wright, Christopher Wilson, Art Department Coordinators Jason Howard, Daniel A. Saks, Alexandra Rubinstein, Deborah Raymond, Nancy S. Fallace, Set Decorators PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

A TALE of THREE CITIES Approaching Design of the Enigmatic by Laurence Bennett, Production Designer

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

”I don’t like the idea of understanding a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need to have it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”

–Federico Fellini

Previous spread: The company arrives after hiatus to the newly completed Hotel St. Jacques set on Teatro 15 at Cinecittà. Top: The construction crew begins building the complex of rooms that morphs into different hotels. In the foreground is a traditional white model of the the Mercer Hotel version, built by set draughtsman Francesco Sereni. Right: The set as it nears completion, showing the studio’s traditional framing with flat toggles let into the studs. At left is the pit that will accommodate the stairs for the Hotel St. Jacques. Far right: At the bottom of the steps, Scenic Artists painted the floor of the pit to extend the visual depth of the stairwell. Set photographs by John Paul Rossi

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Set in Paris, Rome and New York, Third Person weaves together stories of three couples. At the film’s center is novelist Michael Leary (Liam Neeson), an artist in personal and creative crisis. Writing in an upscale hotel suite in Paris, he strives to explore (and tries to justify) his feelings and behavior through the characters he creates. Olivia Wilde, James Franco, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody and Moran Atias make up the rest of the sextet in this story of love, loss and the struggle to trust. Writer/director Paul Haggis, with whom I’ve often collaborated, sent me the script upon finishing it three and a half years ago. I was excited by its ambition and complexity and couldn’t wait to get started. Conceptually and stylistically, the work takes cues from Antonioni (whose work Paul and I have both long been drawn to) and Buñuel; the script is thematically complex, and—intentionally—structurally confusing. The lines between the three stories blur, eventually breaking down entirely. Story and environmental elements migrate between locales, setting up a disconcerting and enigmatic puzzle for the viewer. The obstacles encountered in the process of getting started may have contributed to a slight surreality in actually making the picture. A film with 1960s’ European cinema in its DNA is likely to have difficulty finding funding in today’s marketplace, and it wasn’t until after two years of false starts that prep began as a Belgian production. Budget constraints prevented us from shooting—as we obviously had hoped—in all three cities, so principal photography was done entirely in Italy. This turned out to be a gift of fate; that environment and culture suffused the process with a kind of magic.

Production photographs by Maria Marin/© Sony Pictures Classics

Top: Anna (Olivia Wilde) and novelist Michael Leary (Liam Neeson) in the set for Michael’s suite at the Hotel St. Jacques in Paris. Center: Michael writing in the Paris suite. Above: The corresponding suite in the Mercer Hotel, New York. PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Supervising Art Director. His experience and sensibilities complement mine, and his great imagination and droll humor were welcome assets throughout the process. Set decorator Raffaella Giovannetti (La Migliore Offerta, Everest, Rome) brought grace and discernment to everything. And the teams Luca and Raffy put together were the most gifted, focused and dedicated imaginable.

Top: The workspace at Rick’s Brooklyn, NY, loft shot, like the bulk of the film, in Italy. Above: Rick (James Franco), here with his son, plays one half of an estranged couple, in this film exploring the trajectories of relationships. Above, right: Computer-cut rolling steel divider screens separate work from living spaces in Rick’s loft.

Working in Italy was a dream. The crew was among the very best I’ve ever worked with, their level of commitment and professionalism unsurpassed. Despite the fact that almost the entire crew was working from a translation of an already quite complicated script, and despite a shooting schedule even more talent-driven and compartmentalized than usual, all went smoothly. Misunderstandings on an operatic level were kept to a minimum—certainly no more than you might experience on any film that strives to reach beyond its means. I was very fortunate to have fellow ADG member Luca Tranchino (Hugo, The Aviator, Cold Mountain) as

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

After the visual attributes of each of the city’s stories had been determined, a challenge was clear: the large, disparate collection of settings in the elliptical and ambiguous narrative resisted order. The only clear line through nonconsecutive passages and interrupted arcs was to be found in playing up the juxtapositions, the contrasts. Small visual resonances could then be found between the stories in thematic elements: water, language, the written word. On some level the story is a mystery, so there’s no shortage of misdirection; the counterfeit required depiction no less realistic and believable than the actual. It was important that every set, no matter how apparently incidental, deserved back-story, history. Thus, Cafe Napoli was styled as a dance club for Italian expats in Paris, themed with

images of Pulcinella and commedia dell’arte masks; and Bar Americano in the vibrant Roman district of Testaccio was imagined to have been decorated by its previous owners back in the 1970s per their notion of a stateside lounge, the decor subsumed over the years by an overlay of local soccer memorabilia. It was not an overtly ironic move to film Via Veneto, the heart of 1960s’ La Dolce Vita culture, as a Paris avenue. First assistant director Mishka Cheyko, who lives in Paris, concurred that it was the just the best choice available. An art gallery, florist’s kiosk, sidewalk cafe and Morris column provided points of focus for an extended walk and talk on the first morning of photography, paparazzi skirting the edges of the set trying to grab shots of Liam and Olivia. An interesting benchmark of eccentricity was set for the shoot. Shooting in and on the streets of Rome can be challenging: the city ’s center is never free of huge numbers of tourists; and no matter the number of assistants, PAs and marshals applied to control, a percentage of Romans will ignore entreaties to cooperate. That said, things went remarkably smoothly, even for the largest exterior scenes: in Piazza della Rotonda (stunt driving through the crowd in a pedestrian zone in front of the Pantheon), and in Piazza Farnese (for the movie’s final scene, which required the square to be completely empty for an extended period). The Rome story detours to a port city, the scene of a possible child kidnapping. We scouted Genoa, Naples and Salerno before choosing the ancient city of Tàranto on the Ionian Sea. The interior of the old city—an island—is in significant decay, the neighborhoods pretty much no-go zones for police. Preteen scouts buzz on scooters through narrow, winding pathways between crumbling, gutted buildings...nothing goes unnoticed. It was in this dense, visually stimulating jumble that we found a local bar and a circolo (social club) where

tense negotiations for return of the child are held. As well as supervising installations in Rome, Art Director Dimitri Capuani oversaw work in Tàranto, designing and managing the construction of a dockside bar: a converted shipping container, based on one I’d found in Genova.

Top: This elevation of a five-star hotel suite was hand-drawn by Assistant Art Director Gianpaolo Rifino, and then colored and textured digitally. Above: The completed set on stage.

Storied, idiosyncratic Cinecittà is a wondrous place. Even in its notably faded glory, the studio sings with the vibration of all that has been created there, making it a particularly appropriate and inspiring base for the production. Art Department coordinator Francesca Birri and department assistant John Paul Rossi were adept at keeping everything functioning well, and communication clear—in our office, onstage and backlot—through interesting changes. Five hotels are featured in the story; significant interiors of four were built on stage. The two main ones each comprise an entire floor, and as a story point share a PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Photographs by Bruno Lowagie

common footprint. Asssitant Art Director Chiara Crugnola led the complex design development of the two, doing most of the extensive drawing, and coordinating the transformation. Over a holiday hiatus, the set for Soho’s chic Mercer Hotel in New York underwent a ground-up rebuilding to become the Beaux-Arts St. Jacques in Paris. Construction manager Luigi Sergianni carried out the conversion against odds and obstacles. Carpentry, plasterwork and paint somehow came together; the set was stripped to a shell, every single architectural element replaced, chandeliers raised as carpet gave way to marble floors and custom rugs—only occasionally with incidents reminiscent of Fellini. Sergio (who did a half dozen films with Il Maestro) all the while assured me that the apparent pandemonium was transitory. Luca, as always, helped keep things in perspective, noting “It’s a comedy. Until we cry. And then it’s a tragedy.” The three words “It’s a comedy,” became an oftenheard phrase, never failing to yield laughter from any situation. Assistant Art Directors Gianpaolo Rifino and Briseide Siciliano and draughtsman Francesco Sereni produced drawings for location, stage and backlot sets digitally or by hand as each required. While SketchUp® models were used for scale and lens considerations, it was Francesco’s old-school foamcore and card models of the main sets that proved most useful in discussions with director, cinematographer, grips and electricians, and construction personnel. On the backlot of the studio, street sets for Paris, Brooklyn and even a brief Manhattan exterior were created, the main New York street heavily augmented with the scaffolding, steam vents and taxis (shipped from Bulgaria) that are such ubiquitous visual elements of the city. In addition to a broad range of signage and printed matter, manuscripts, posters, books and journals, graphic designer Silvia Fontana brought her skills and sly humor to play, working imagery of language and literature into many sets: in displays at a Paris bookfair, and in a dense landscape of letterforms that was computer-cut through sliding steel panels that divide work from living spaces in Rick’s (James Franco) Brooklyn loft. Top: The Art Department research boards dealt simultaneously with locations and backlot streets, searching for stand-ins for New York, Paris and Rome. Center: Cinecittà’s generic backlot streets could be redressed for both New York and Paris. Bottom: A view from inside a backlot bistro storefront reveals a Boulangerie/Patisserie and a Salvatore Ferragamo store across the street.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Left: A hand-drawn detail for a typical Parisian advertising colonne Morris, by Assistant Art Director Gianpaolo Rifino. Below, left: Bar Americano, Testaccio, Rome. Below, right: San Cataldo and Bar al Porto watch over the harbor of Tàranto, Puglia, background to the Roman story of Sean (Adrien Brody) and Monika (Moran Atias).

The film crews I’ve worked with in recent years have become increasingly more international and, surprisingly, I’ve only worked with one American cinematographer in the course of my most recent eight features. The opportunity to share influences and approaches brings an even deeper appreciation of, and involvement with, the wealth of filmmaking around the world. With Gianfilippo Corticelli (Don’t Move, Twice Born) I found a warm, dynamic collaboration. We spent a lot of time together—not just in prep, but through the shoot— on visual attributes of the picture’s different strands, debating palette considerations and color temperature shifts that would track the story’s movements. The most striking thing about the project was the enjoyment of the moment that everyone on the crew consistently shared throughout, working hard not just with a sense of common purpose, but with exceptional pleasure. I believe more strongly than ever in the importance of communal lunches, coffee breaks taken

outside the office, and—most importantly—shared laughter. As artists we don’t just have the opportunity to affect people through our work; we are changed as well by the work we make. The experiences I shared with my colleagues and friends on Third Person undeniably enriched my life. After all, it’s a comedy. ADG

Laurence Bennett, Production Designer Luca Tranchino, Supervising Art Director Dimitri Capuani, Art Director Gianpaolo Rifino, Briseide Siciliano, Giulia Chiara Crugnola, Assistant Art Directors Silvia Fontana, Graphic Designer Francesco Sereni, Set Draughtsman Cristiano Donzelli, Storyboard Artist Raffaella Giovannetti, Set Decorator

ÂŠ Warner Bros.

KICKSTARTING VERONICA MARS by Jeff Schoen, Production Designer

Before a legion of loyal fans turned Veronica Mars into a feature film, it was a television seriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one that I was only vaguely aware of and had never seen. My colleague, Art Director Elizabeth Cummings, had never watched it either, but we both soon discovered the huge subculture of Veronica Mars fans who were still anxiously awaiting the next installment of their beloved series. 32

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Opposite page: A production still of Kristen Bell in her office at Mars Investigations, built in the Southwestern Bag Company location in downtown Los Angeles. This page, top: This SketchUpÂŽ model by Jeff Schoen is an exercise to integrate existing set elements from Giaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s loft set into a space for the Mars Investigations office. Above: The finished and dressed office set. Left: Construction details of partition walls built into Southwestern Bag for the office set, drawn by Mr. Schoen.

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Above, and bottom: Two views of a SketchUp rendering of Gia’s loft, drawn by Art Director Elizabeth Cummings. Below: A set still of some of the loft’s detail, built in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse.

The fact that the movie exists at all is kind of astounding. In the years since 2007 when the UPN/CW series was canceled, writer/director Rob Thomas had talked about bringing it back as a movie, but Warner Bros. wasn’t convinced there was enough interest to warrant a major studio film about the high school detective who solves crimes as a way to make sense of the bigger mysteries in her life, so the project never got off the ground. Rob, and star Kristen Bell, knew the project had a small-butpassionate audience, and proposed an ambitious solution: if they could raise $2 million in crowdsourced funding through Kickstarter.com,

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Warner Bros. could have a film to release with a zerodollar negative cost. “The Warner Bros. brass agreed to allow us to take this shot,” Rob wrote. “They were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board.” The Veronica Mars campaign set a new Kickstarter record, raising a million dollars in four hours and twenty-four minutes. Less than twelve hours after launching, thanks to the fact that the show’s legions of fans emptied their pockets to finance the project, the campaign hit its two million dollar goal. In the end, it pulled in a whopping $5.7 million in only thirty days. That kind of commitment brought a special challenge to defining the look of the film. These die-hard fans wanted to see their show return just as it was, but the film takes place a decade later, when styles have

changed and the characters have matured. As a result, the film needed to take on a different look. It was important to find a good balance between the established feel of the television series and a contemporary style for the film. Rob Thomas, and producers Dan Etheridge and Danielle Stokdyk, came to the table fully immersed in the world of Veronica Mars, where I arrived with fresh and unbiased eyes. It created a dynamic partnership, which allowed a respected continuity with the past as well as an all together new look to emerge. I love Edward Hopper’s paintings, so I developed a color palette of desaturated blue, green and mustard hues. Cinematographer Ben Kutchins added an anamorphic aspect ratio and hard noir-styled lighting, which played perfectly to Rob’s vision of the noir detective agency. Soon we were talking about The Thin Man series, and all the great old noir films, and so the three of us were off and running.

While the stunning Kickstarter success allowed a larger production than originally envisioned, there were still only four weeks of prep time and a twenty-twoday shooting schedule, and the tiny four-member Art Department had to create more than forty sets. The extremely limited budget called for locationbased sets and a limited footprint. Locations were needed that allowed for at least two sets, or more if possible, without moving the company. After scouring Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles to re-create the fictional Neptune, California, one important set remained: Gia’s loft. Gia’s loft is central to a spying and chase sequence that demanded a lot of connective architectural tissue. It needed to be adjacent to a specific rooftop, have large windows and confined access that led down a staircase to a contained space with no escape. It soon became clear that all of these elements would not be

Above: The SketchUp kitchen shown here is part of the same Elizabeth Cummings model shown on the opposite page. Below: The finished and dressed loft kitchen.

Right: SketchUp allowed Elizabeth Cummings to draw two possible variations of the overscale custom wallpaper in Ruby’s apartment set. Below: The second option was chosen as shown is this set still of the finished and dressed apartment.

found in one location. The location that had been found met all but one element. To make it work, a fairly expansive set would need to be built inside a vacant warehouse. However, there still wasn’t the budget to do so. Running short on prep time, I pitched the idea that Gia’s loft could be reconfigured from the same elements used to build Mars Investigations, one of four sets at a location where we were already shooting, eliminating an entire location and a company move. This production savings freed up the necessary funds to build Gia’s, a sophisticated and elegant downtown loft that reflects her wealth and stature. In the design of the loft, I used sleek surfaces and glass partitions to contrast with the existing concrete pillars

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

and exposed brick walls, along with the simple look of sheetrock partitions and breeze block detailing to keep a spacious feel. I wanted to be able to see through Gia’s space effectively and thoroughly, so it had to be visually transparent and open, but at the same time physically confined. The simple lines and materials also helped to keep costs in check. Construction coordinator Tomas Sallvin did a remarkable job giving me the look I wanted with very limited funds. Another design challenge for the small crew centered around the creation of custom photography. We had only one day to work with New York-based actress/ singer Andrea Estella on the set, but needed to have several elements designed with her image ready to

go before her arrival. Elizabeth managed an effective process working directly with Entertainment Weekly (EW) magazine in New York to shoot a series of photos of Andrea for us, including a prop EW cover and an image for custom, larger-than-life, wallpaper of the singer.

“The Warner Bros. brass were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board.”

The wallpaper was designed to wrap around a corner, and accommodate a doorway and a window in an existing location. For the wallpaper to wrap successfully around the room, Andrea had to lie down with her elbow propped under her chin in just the right way, with her torso angled away in just the right direction to fit the proportions of the space. Elizabeth created a mockup of the room using SketchUp® to convey the needed information to the New York photographer, but she still wanted an image to reference the pose. Art Department Coordinator Canada Gordon came up with the solution by asking the film’s payroll accountant to sprawl across a desk and strike a pose…It was pretty hilarious!

excited fans truly transforms the energy of a set. In the scene of a reunion party that takes place in Gia’s loft, the backers brought a vibrant sense of exhilaration. They were genuinely having fun; it was like filming a real party. Kelly Rae Hemenway created a number of graphic design Easter eggs for the Kickstarters. For example: a cab-topper lotto ad with the balls numbered 9-15-8-5, the total number of backers, and a subway ad referencing the number 5,702,153, the total amount of money raised in the Kickstarter campaign. They were a special thank-you to the Kickstarter fans, without whom there would not have been a film at all. ADG

Jeff Schoen, Production Designer Elizabeth Cummings, Art Director Kelly Rae Hemenway, Graphic Designer Timothy Burgard, Storyboard Artist Cindy Coburn, Set Decorator

Above: A set photograph of the set for the TrumanMann law offices, shot in the Los Angeles Times building in downtown Los Angeles. Below: Premiere Cinemas in Lubbock, TX, offered a special screening to the VERONICA MARS fans (calling themselves MARShmallows), who supported the film with contributions to the passion project on Kickstarter.com. The funding campaign gained over $2 million in its first ten hours after launch, and after one month, the campaign had topped $5 million.

At the end of the day, this film was funded by 91,585 investors. Kickstarter was the vehicle, but the real funding came from the fans. At a certain level of contribution, you, as an investor/fan, got to be a featured background extra in the film. One hundred PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR

LIFE

by Carlos A. Menendez, Production Designer

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Co-producer Lynn Appelle said she wanted to meet me in person before she would sign my deal memo. I immediately remembered the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci gets all dressed up thinking he is going to be made, but ends up getting whacked. What could she want from me that required an in-person meeting? I had not yet agreed to a salary and had never done a Tier 1 (micro-budget) independent movie so there were some fuzzy details going into the meeting. However, a few things were clear, Rob the Mob was a true New York crime story, a period piece set in the 1990s, spanning two years, four seasons, sixty sets, gunfire, special effects, five weeks of prep and twenty-five days to shoot. I could have used an Advil but ordered a chai latte and Lynn asked for an iced cafe mocha. We sat at a table seeing who would stir first. “You’ve never done a Tier 1, right?” she asked. “No,” I replied.

“Well, that’s why I wanted to do this in person.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a spiral notepad and tore off a piece of paper. She pushed it across the table. “This is your set budget...all in.” I looked at the paper and saw a bullet leaving the barrel, lead tip first, spinning clockwise and in my direction. “You still have time to walk away,” she said, “I know it ain’t pretty.” “You’re kidding, right?” I said. Lynn wasted no time in firing another round. “Here’s what I’ve got in for the Production Designer on a weekly basis. There’s no money for Saturdays or Sundays.” I never even saw her second bullet. I heard only the sound of the brass casing bouncing across the floor. “Wow, Lynn,” I said holding my stomach, “you weren’t kidding about this being a period picture. I haven’t made this kind of money since 1990.” Lynn laughed. “Maybe I can frame my first check and use it as set dressing.” After the holdup, I stumbled down 6th Avenue in a light drizzle toward my office in Union Square. It might have been sweat, but it felt more like blood running down my lower extremities and into my socks. How could I do a movie with so many sets, such little time and so little money? By the time I arrived at my desk, I knew point blank that regardless of the budget, Rob the Mob was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The script was sensational, written by Jonathan Fernandez and produced by William Teitler, and a project directed by Raymond De Felitta was something that I could not walk away from. If I wanted to do the movie, I would have to give up my money...and my life. The year is 1991 and 28-year-old Thomas Uva (Michael Pitt) and Rosie Uva (Nina Arianda) are in love, broke, a bit bored and ready for some action. Having grown up around gangsters in the Bronx, Thomas is somewhat of a mob buff, fascinated by John Gotti. He skips work at his low-paying job with a collection agency to go hear turncoat mobsters testify at Gotti’s racketeering trial in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. During testimony, Tommy learns that, out of some weird Mafia etiquette, gangsters don’t take guns into their social clubs. Needing some quick cash to address a gathering drug problem, Tommy begins scheming. He thinks mobsters have money and without guns might be an easy target. And furthermore, is robbing the mob really a crime? It’s not their money in the first place. He buys an Uzi machine gun, enlists Rosie as the getaway driver and off they go, New York’s modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.

Opposite page: Tommy and Rosie (Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda) leave the mob’s Bath Avenue Social Club. Left: A neon sign for a mob’s Hawaiian-themed club was squeezed out of the Tier 1 film’s budget. Below: All of the actual locations were within a mile-and-a-half radius in Ozone Park. Second from bottom: Tommy and Rosie’s studio apartment exterior by the elevated subway tracks at 104th and Jamaica in Ozone Park, Queens. Bottom: A local Democratic headquarters became the exterior of the mob’s Union Avenue Social Club.

40'-10"

Living Room

14' 0"

Cabinet

8'x10' Rug

Counter

8'x8' Rug

3'-0"

Fridge

2'-8"

4' 0"

2'-8"

Table

3'-0"

Queen Bed

2'-8"

14'-0"

Couch

Bathtub

Cassette Collection 7'-0"

3'-0"

2'-0"

New TV

2'-8"

18" Nightstand

Stove

Cabinet

Safe

14'-0"

14' 0"

2'-8"

12' 0"

Kitchen

3'-0"

Bedroom

1'-0" 3'-0"

6'-0"

3'-0" 1'-0"

On a Tier 1 movie, a discussion of logistics usually precedes any talk of aesthetics, and on Rob the Mob, the storyline led the way. Tommy and Rosie Uva lived, were married, worked, robbed and were murdered in Ozone Park, Queens, in an area with a circumference of less than a mile and a half. To work within our Scale: and remain authentic to the events and the Set: Studio Apartment - Fullmeans Dress screenplay, Raymond, Bill Teitler and I agreed on the 3/16" = 1'-0" (1:64) Location: 35 - 35 10th Street, Long Island City, NY following strategy: We would shoot the film right in the neighborhood where it happened. We would save money Date: 04/25/2013 and time by creating a nucleus, a main street from which the bulk of our filming locations would radiate thus keeping the production company footprint small and the location moves short. In terms of both research and filming, gaining access to the real social clubs was of paramount importance to both Ray and I and probably the reason why I didn’t speak much about color palette in the first meeting. We both wanted to shoot in the clubs and if we got in, I couldn’t see myself flipping through paint swatches with an ex-captain of the Gambino crime family. I could just hear this: “Hey Carlo, what’s with this Benjamin Moore Whispering Heaven Blue? Didn’t I tell you not to paint this place? I’ll show you what shade of blue heaven is.” And then whack, I’m in a freezer on Coney Island with nothing to identify me but a prescription for Lipitor in my front shirt pocket. As the Production Designer on Rob the Mob, I decided that if I walked into a Mafia den and didn’t like the wall color, I would live with it, not die because of it. To qualify as a Tier 1 independent film and get the tax rebate from the state of New York, I had to construct one three-walled set on a stage somewhere in the state of New York. If we’d had the money, I would

Opposite page: A director’s plan and two production photographs of Tommy and Rosie’s shotgun apartment, shot in Long Island City. Left: The modern-day Bonnie and Clyde duo decide that robbing mobsters may not really be a crime. Below: Fictional newspapers were created, as well as suitably low-rent signage for the social clubs. Bottom: Young lovers in New York have to visit Coney Island.

r ts Best Spo

I n The C

ity

the first real-life social club that the Uvas have built Tommy and Rosie’s studio apartment on (Tommy and Rosie) held up—the Liberty a stage because it had the most script pages, and Avenue Social Club. In their exploits, Tommy could be used as a rain cover-set. But there was no and Rosie had not traveled far from home money to build a big set or even to hold a stage. and in making this film neither did we. I picked the interior of an FBI surveillance van. It was the smallest, cheapest set to build with the most For dramatic purposes, Jonathan Fernandez dialogue needing sound control. But even with these reduced the number of clubs the couple strategic choices, I still felt pretty desperate about our Bes t Spo rts In ThAvenue e CitSocial robbed to four: the Union y financial situation. The Art Department needed money. Club (actually named the Liberty Avenue I needed a clearance person, a graphic designer and Social Club), Bath Avenue (same as Bath ink cartridges. The prop department needed an extra LATE CITY FINAL Ave.), Waikiki (actually named Hawaiian windshield made of tempered glass and a spare tire Moonlighters) and Spacca Napoli (actually for the getaway car. Set decorator Robert Covelman John Gotti’s Ravenite Club in Little Italy). needed a shopper, an extra truck and furniture Only the Little Italy Social Club was outside blankets. The break room in the production office our radius so, to avoid a big company move needed coffee filters, a sponge and more hand soap. and the expense of closing a New York street for filming, we dragged that scene back In the days that followed, we used the paradigm of into our sphere and shot the interior at a a central spine and radiating ribs to find the most members-only club in Ozone Park. The club important locations in the movie. Jamaica Avenue in looked ‘authentic you could say.’ Location Ozone Park became Main Street. Tommy and Rosie’s managers Eddy Collyns and Trish Gray studio apartment was found at the corner of 104th found the place by accident. (Although and Jamaica. It had second-floor windows facing Barbara Bush Warns Hillar y Clinton to the subway tracks, which was exactly what Raymond "Avoid Reporters wanted. Their rooftop, a newsstand, driving shots and various stretches for walks and talks and interactions with neighborhood gangsters were found nearby. A short distance to the south was Rosie’s mother’s house (played by Aida Turturro). It was on a corner across from Bayside Cemetery. For the opening love scene between Tommy and Rosie in her mother’s house, Raymond wanted the cemetery to appear in the background. The orientation of the upstairs bedroom windows of this house did not work. A few doors down was a second-floor bedroom offering a better angle on the cemetery with tombstones behind the headboard. This house was less than one hundred yards from

HAMMERED AGAIN

THURSDAY OCTOBER

22, 1992 / HIGH 60s

40 CENTS NEW YORK

CITY

50 CENT ELSWHERE

WHO'S ROBBING

HAMMERED AGAIN

THE MOB??

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Street 54' 11" 21' 0"

33' 6" 10' 0"

Break Away Bottles

20' 0"

15' 7"

8' 7 1/2"

3' 6" 2' 0"

4' 0" 2' 0"

30"

Pool Table

48"

7' 7"

2' 0" 4' 0"

7' 1"

the windowless nondescript facade and the two-way mirrored front door did offer a clue.) When the owner opened the door to let us in, we knew we were in the real thing. The place had a bar and every square inch of wall space was covered with memorabilia including a photo of the cast of Goodfellas. “Sergio, I said to the owner one day, is that what I think it is? Are those two prosthetic legs screwed to the ceiling?” And after a long reflective pause he said, “Oh yea...that guy.”

Existing Bench Shelving Unit with Break Away Pictures

Set: Union Avenue Social Club Location: Polonia - 140 Grand St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 11249 Date: 04/25/2013

26' 0"

Rob the Mob wanted to show the mob on the ropes within the milieu of a crumbling New York, caught in the recession of the early ‘90s. These gangsters were not supposed to be Michael and Sonny Corleone. They were old-timers (played by Burt Young and John Tormey) who, when asked to empty their pockets, were more concerned with giving up their bus pass and their Flomax than the few dollars they had left in their Scale:wallets. Movies and television shows before us, like The Sopranos, had done a brilliant job painting a portrait 1/8" = 1'-0" (1:96) of a blue-collar mob; but we were worried that over eighty-six episodes and six seasons, The Sopranos may have shot every nook and cranny of New York and New Jersey in the process. The bandwidth for the down-andout New York mob look is not immense and it became a challenge to dig up something fresh. Thorough research, image gathering and the creation of news timelines by talented NYU Tisch School of the Arts interns Laura Christiansen, Alysia Anderson, Donald Leone and Sara Monahan were extremely helpful painting the picture of New York in the ‘90s. The location department’s success in gaining access to the real clubs showed us that the closest likeness to Mafia social clubs could be found in meeting halls such as the American Legion, VFW and your everyday neighborhood fire hall. The cheap wood paneling, Samsonite tables, burned-out coffee pots, Styrofoam cups, cans of Lysol, portraits of war heroes, sculptures of the Virgin Mary and prayer cards were common to all of them. With the exception of Spacca Napoli, the club where Tommy is wounded, every social club was filmed in one of these meeting halls.

Above, top: Director’s plans, such as this for the Union Avenue Social Club, made up the bulk of the drawings for this Tier 1 project. Center: The interior of the Waikiki Club was a fun exercise in Ozone Park tropical set dressing. Above: A production photograph of the robbery at the Union Avenue Club. When Tommy learns that, out of some weird Mafia etiquette, gangsters don’t take guns into their social clubs, he thought of a way to solve his financial problems.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Due to practical concerns and storyline elements, several sets required that we leave our filming zone and create a second spine or nucleus. First was the interior of Tommy and Rosie’s studio apartment. Although the exterior at the level of the subway tracks at 104th and Jamaica was great, we were not able to shoot the interior scenes in that apartment because of the subway noise. In addition, the city of New York would not grant a permit to place lights on the elevated platform to light the apartment from the outside. A ground-floor interior in Long Island City had a great deteriorated look that cinematographer Chris Norr could easily light. At first I felt the interior was too far gone for Tommy and Rosie, and I didn’t have the scenic manpower to change much or bring it back; but Raymond loved it and, after some arm-twisting, he won.

A second location outside of the initial filming zone was Al Fiorello’s house, the mob boss played by Andy Garcia. From my initial presentation to Raymond, I felt that the house had to be on a body of water. The back-story in the screenplay is that Al’s son has been killed in the mob business and he is now full of regrets. A location on the water would take the movie out of the claustrophobia of windowless social clubs and give Fiorello the space to roam in the melancholia of his character. A house in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, had a large patio facing Jamaica Bay. Hurricane Sandy had devastated the area and insurance companies were not covering the full cost of repairs. A house that would have normally been unaffordable to a Tier 1 independent movie was now within our means. And of course, it helped that the gracious owners, a Manhattan injury attorney and his wife, were big Andy Garcia fans. They hosted Andy and all of us for a big Italian lunch where we drank and smoked cigars and made all kinds of mob jokes. Scotch in hand, Eddy and I took the owner of the house out to the back patio. “Tom, you see your neighbor’s house here under reconstruction?” Eddy said, pointing. “Yea,” Tom said, “what about it?” “Well, Andy has a lot of dialogue out here on this patio. Do you think you can silence the construction noise for the filming?” “I’ll take care of the guy...” Tom said. We laughed, toasted and went back in.

Courthouse on the Grand Concourse became an un-renovated courthouse for the John Gotti trial scenes where Tommy learns that gangsters don’t pack guns in their social clubs. From there I thought it would be easy to find streets suitable for the Valentine’s Day Flower Shop heist and Tommy’s parent’s flower shop (Frank’s Flowers). These two locations proved to be the most difficult to find in the movie. I just could not find viable flower shops in areas run down enough to look like the Bronx in the ‘90s. If a flower shop is profitable, then it’s probably in a decent neighborhood. Compounding our troubles was the fact that the shooting schedule

Below and center: The collection agency where Tommy and Rosie worked was scheduled to be shot at Acumen Stages in Brooklyn, but there was no money for a set on the stage. An abandoned office area with existing partitions was made to work. Bottom: To assist director Raymond De Felitta, the Art Department determined where the assorted ex-convicts, employees of the collection agency, would sit. The schematic, somewhere between set design and casting, showing the various characters in their carefully crafted cubicle environments.

“What could she want from me that required an in-person meeting? I immediately remembered the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci gets all dressed up thinking he is going to be made, but ends up getting whacked.”

In the opening scene, Tommy and Rosie hold up a flower store in the Bronx on Valentine’s Day. Having grown up working in his parent’s flower shop in the Bronx, Tommy knows that on Valentine’s Day the registers are full. The Bronx has a decidedly different look than Manhattan, Brooklyn or Queens and in the ‘90s the streets looked as bombed out as Kosovo. We could not find a patch in Brooklyn or Queens to pull off the look, so we decided to create an additional nucleus in the Bronx from which we would radiate to find several sets. With its mahogany-carved paneling, tall ceilings and beautiful windows, the Bronx

Bull Pen

R em nant s of B i rt hday C el ebrat i on

Unavai l abl e Junk R oom / Hol di ng A rea for Props

Hallway

W hi t e B oard

Lovell's Office

Coffee Room

Hero Newspaper

32' 10"

called for filming the Valentine’s Day scene the week of Mother’s Day, one of the biggest flower sales days of the year. There was no way a Tier 1 independent Set: Office film FBI was going to buy out a flower shop that week. After two weeks of scouting, two streets in the Bronx Location: were Acuman found, dilapidated enough to play as ‘90s New York. One housed a struggling barbershop and the Date: 5/17/2013 other an abandoned mattress store. Thanks to the resourcefulness of Art Director Raphael Sorcio and set decorator Robert Covelman, two flower shops were built and decorated with what amounted to smoke and mirrors. From there the remaining sets were easy: some driving shots and a bar where a journalist from The Carlos Menendez, New York Metropolitan Daily (Ray Romano) meets an Production Designer FBI agent (Frank Whaley). Raphael Sorcio, Art Director With all the exterior locations in order, we moved to the Amy Dholakia-Jorand, stage in Brooklyn. There we would shoot the collection Lead Graphic Artist agency where Tommy and Rosie worked, but there was Robert Covelman, no money for a set on the stage. An abandoned office Set Decorator area with existing partitions would have to work. The Above: A SketchUp® rendering of the FBI conference room revealed how it could be shot against black without building a real “set,” and it also generated a colored director’s plan.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

partitions were higher than I would have liked; I wanted to be able to shoot over them. We also needed to be able to take them apart and move them to allow space for lighting and dolly track, but the location’s owners said no. Necessity being the mother of invention, Raphael and I had carpenters build an office at the end of the partition corridor out of practically nothing—1x3s and plexiglass. The office, to be occupied by Tommy and Rosie’s boss (Griffin Dunne) would serve as a focal point to draw your eye down the hallway into an area that Chris could light and light from. The immoveable partition crisis also caused Raymond to make an earlier-than-necessary commitment where the assorted ex-convicts, employees of the collection agency, would sit. To assist in this matter, the Art Department drew a schematic that was somewhere between set design and casting, showing the various characters in their carefully crafted cubicle environments. The tiny three-walled set owed to the state of New York in order to obtain the tax rebate was built on a twelve-inch steel deck utilizing two back doors salvaged from the actual van that had been shot in the exterior scenes.

“The bandwidth for the downand-out New York mob look is not immense; it became a challenge to dig up something fresh. The closest likeness to Mafia social clubs could be found in meeting halls such as the American Legion, VFW and your everyday neighborhood fire hall. The cheap wood paneling, Scale: Samsonite tables, burned-out 1/4" = 1'-0" (1:48) coffee pots, Styrofoam cups, cans of Lysol, portraits of war heroes, sculptures of the Virgin Mary and prayer cards were common to all of them.”

Down the hall on the same floor was a room to use as an FBI conference room set. Having once been a manufacturing building, the walls and ceilings of the room had massive holes where equipment had been torn out. Covering three walls with a royal blue curtain, hanging portraits of FBI directors, and bringing in a

conference table, chairs and a projector with the lights turned way down low, again created a set with very little money. On the morning of December 24, 1992, Tommy and Rosie Uva were at a red light in their burgundy Mercury Topaz at the intersection of Woodhaven Boulevard and 103rd Avenue in Ozone Park. Two or more men approached their car and fired through the windows, killing them both instantly. The couple’s brazen robberies had so infuriated the mob that FBI wiretaps caught two New York crime families arguing over who should get credit for the murders.

Below: The production owed New York a complete three-wall set, built on a stage, in order to obtain the state’s tax rebate. The smallest possible set was selected: the interior of an FBI surveillance van was built on a twelve-inch steel deck utilizing two back doors salvaged from the actual van that had been shot in the exterior scenes.

A Tier 1 independent movie could not afford to close streets, much less the busy intersection of Woodhaven and 103rd, in the middle of the day. Also, the lead up to their murder scene in the car had already been shot at night, so the murder scene would have to take place at night as well. With the location managers tied down filming, I began scouting on my own at night, looking for the location. One night after dinner at Agnanti, a Greek restaurant in Astoria, Queens, I remembered the view from a set shop near the East River I had used for commercials. I typed the address into my iPhone and the militant, automated voice led me there, to the T-intersection of 43rd Avenue and Vernon Jordan, right under the Queensborough Bridge. I got out of the car and I could see the final scene of Rob the Mob laid out in front of me. On my right, the Queensborough Bridge, lit courtesy of the city of New York, and on my left, a beautiful panorama of midtown Manhattan with Citicorp just at the edge of the frame. I took a few shots for Raymond and Chris and got back in my car. As I was driving away, I slammed on the breaks. “Holy shit, when was the Citicorp building built?” I could not make the mistake of featuring a building built after 1991 in the movie. I googled, the question:1977, my phone answered. I was off the hook. Tier independent films are fragile entities. They operate on razor-thin financial margins and require the greatest collaboration and efficiency from their crews. On some days, the drama can be Shakespearean: in the morning, fighting like an Italian family at a lunch table. But by evening, I becomes we and a happily civil filmmaking family sits at the dinner table together. We did it. Rob the Mob got made.

Eased Edge

2' 0" For Window Details Refer to Elevation B

2' 0"

Radius Shown at 6"

Wild Wall

5' 6"

2' 7 3/4"

1' 0"

Wild Ceiling Piece

1/2" Carpeted Flakeboard Shown as Extending 1'-0" Beyond Van Build

1' 10 1/4"

It is in this spirit of family camaraderie that I give thanks to William Teitler for his vision and perseverance, Raymond De Felitta for his graciousness, openness and collaboration, Jonathan Fernandez for a beautiful script, the hard-working Art Department, and last but not least, co-producer Lynn Appelle. For her I’ll take a bullet, any time, sitting or standing— fugetaboutit. ADG

7' 3"

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

OMIC BOOK ART

The influence of comic books on Created by Art Directors Guild Members, the history of filmmaking has been Collected by Patrick Rodriguez, Illustrator well documented, so it comes as no Artist/author Chris surprise that many motion picture Illustrators and Concept Brandt writes: Artists moonlight drawing comic books, and a few comic “FOREVER IN A MOMENT is a personal book artists moonlight in the entertainment industry as well. and true story from a day in my life. As an Film and television have been dominated by comic/fantasy adult I was trying to figure out the connection characters since the beginnings of each of those art forms. between facts, memory and the self, and this Graphic novels have nearly all been especially influenced story was a part of by film techniques, design and cinematography. When Art that exploration. It was drawn with ink Spiegelman received a special Pulitzer Prize for Maus, it was and brush, but colored digitally.” clear that the comic book had moved toward the center of popular culture. The work on these pages is some of the medium’s best, and the ADG artists who created it continue to bring the two artistic arenas closer together. PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Chris Brandt grew up internationally as a US diplomatic brat, with ties to Columbia, Maryland, and Mount Shasta, California. He graduated with a BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and selfpublished his own minicomics for many years. It was at a comic book convention that he first met ADG Senior Illustrator Josh Sheppard, who encouraged Chris to move to Los Angeles and pursue storyboarding. In the year 2000, he did just that, and continues to work as both a storyboard artist and assistant director.

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

Dwayne Turnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s BUTCHER KNIGHT is a creator-owned action adventure comic spanning the age of King Arthur to the present day. These pages constitute a small sample of a four-issue miniseries, which will be collected and issued as a graphic novel. The pages are drawn with pencil and ink and colored digitally.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

dwayne turner is from Brooklyn, New York. He attended the High School of Art and Design. During his 11th year he interned, then began to work freelance, for Marvel Comics. He continued to work for Marvel while attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City, graduating with a BFA in art. After a twenty-year career in the comics industry working for Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse Comics, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in video games and film.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

Patrick Rodriguez drew GRAVITONS as a chapter from a much larger story of six survivors of a shipwreck who must re-create civilization for themselves. A century from now, five beautiful cheerleaders, who are more popular than the teams they cheer for, and one man, a reporter on his first assignment, must figure out how to work together to hunt and gather food, find water, shelter and survive the creatures and phenomena on this uncharted planet. PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

patrick rodriGuez is a Concept Designer and Illustrator for feature films who started in visual effects preproduction and has done concept illustration and design, storyboards, modeling, rigging, texturing, rendering, animation, layout, animatics and more for studios including DreamWorks, Lucasfilm, South Park, Sony and Marvel Studios. He is also committed to sharing his knowledge and passion for art and film by teaching and lecturing at Studio Arts, the Costume Designers Guild, Art Center and the Art Directors Guild. He is currently a solutions specialist at Microdesk and recently finished Previsualization for Jaume Collet-Serraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s next film Run All Night.

P E R S P E C T I V E | JU LY/AU G U S T 2014

PERSPECTIVE THE JOURNAL OF THE ART DIRECTORS GUILD

The Huntington

Surprises on the scout . . . not on the day Film savvy â&#x20AC;˘ In-house permitting & parking 20 min. from downtown Los Angeles

Rates: To subscribe, contact: $40 per year (6 issues) Sandra Howard (foreign postage will be added) sandra@adg.org $32 student/educator 818 762 9995 (with current ID)

Gardens, lawns, architecture . . . and other unexpected treasures

Call to arrange a scout 626.405.2215 | FilmHuntington.org

PERSPECTIVE | JULY /AUGUS T 2014

production design PRODUCTION DESIGN CREDIT WAIVERS by Laura Kamogawa, Credits Administrator

The following requests to use the Production Design screen credit were granted at its March and April meetings by the ADG Council upon the recommendation of the Production Design Credit Waiver Committee. THEATRICAL: Hannah Beachler – THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN – MGM Studios Ben Blankenship – 7 MINUTES – Whitewater Films Chris Cornwell – NO GOOD DEED – Screen Gems Nathan Crowley – INTERSTELLAR – Warner Bros. Dante Ferretti – CINDERELLA – Walt Disney Studios Luke Freeborn – SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS 2 – Paramount Pictures Chase Harlan – ENTOURAGE – Warner Bros. Clayton Hartley – HORRIBLE BOSSES 2 – Warner Bros. Devorah Herbert – STEP UP: ALL IN – Lionsgate Chad Keith – MIDNIGHT SPECIAL – Warner Bros. Shannon Kemp – JUST BEFORE I GO – New Artists Alliance Stephen Lineweaver – A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST – Universal Pictures Jefferson Sage – SEX TAPE – Columbia Pictures Steve Saklad – 22 JUMP STREET – Columbia Pictures Sharon Seymour – RUN ALL NIGHT – Warner Bros. Neil Spisak – TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES – Paramount Pictures Jack G. Taylor – ATLAS SHRUGGED: WHO IS JOHN GALT? – Atlas 3 Productions Brent Thomas – IF I STAY – MGM Studios

Christian Pipo Wintter – BLACK AND WHITE – Blackwhite, LLC Martin Whist – NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 3 – 20th Century Fox TELEVISION: Lori Agostino – THE CRAZY ONES – 20th Century Fox P. Erik Carlson – THE MASON TWINS – ABC Studios Jeremy Cassells – LEGENDS – 20th Century Fox Barry Chusid – TURN – AMC Studios Jerry Dunn – PARTNERS and SAINT GEORGE – Both Lionsgate Caroline Hanania – TURN – AMC Studios John Hansen – HIT THE FLOOR – VH1 Productions Jessica Kender – RIZZOLI & ISLES – TNT John Kretschmer – SECRETS & LIES – ABC Studios Joseph P. Lucky – HIT THE FLOOR – VH1 Productions Cabot McMullen – UNDATEABLE – Warner Bros. Anthony Medina – NOVICE – 20th Century Fox Hugh G. Moody – RECTIFY – Sundance Channel Christopher Nowak – DELIVERANCE CREEK – Warner Bros. Victoria Paul – MISTRESSES – ABC Studios Seth Reed – SALEM – 20th Century Fox Greg Richman – GIRL MEETS WORLD – Disney Channel Maxine Shepard – BLACK-ISH – ABC Studios Craig Stearns – DEVIOUS MAIDS – ABC Studios Dawn Snyder – AN AMERICAN EDUCATION and THE PRO – Both ABC Studios Wynn Thomas – HOW TO GET AWAY – ABC Studios

coming soon SEX TAPE Jefferson Sage, Production Designer Elliott Glick, Art Director Bryan Felty, Set Designer Kyra Friedman Curcio, Linda Lee Sutton, Set Decorators Opens July 18

P ER S P EC T I V E | J ULY /AU GU ST 2 0 1 4

FOR ALL YOUR PRODUCTION NEEDS

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS PROPERTY

DRAPERY • STAFF • GRAPHIC DESIGN & SIGN SHOP • HARDWARE SPECIAL EFFECTS EQUIPMENT • FURNITURE MANUFACTURING & UPHOLSTERY Dressed Sets On Time And On Budget • Shop Online 818.777.2784 800.892.1979 filmmakersdestination.com Find Us

Universal Studios_Property Ad_ADG Perspective_12.13

PERSP ECT IVE | JU LY/ AU G U S T 2 0 1 4

membership WELCOME TO THE GUILD by Alex Schaaf, Manager, Membership Department

During the months of March and April, the following 18 new members were approved by the Councils for membership in the Guild: Production Designers: Katherine De Luca – PERFECT 10 – Travel Light Entertainment Baz Halpin – AMERICAN IDOL – Fox Network Virginia Tougas – Various signatory commercials Art Directors: Ann Cummings – HOME INVASION – Red X, LLC Kevin Lang – TUMBLEDOWN – Bron Studios USA, Inc. Chris Nyfield – AMERICAN IDOL – Fox Network Rachel Robb Kondrath – DRUNK HISTORY – Comedy Central Assistant Art Directors: Derek Jensen – GOOD KILL – Clear Skies Nevada, LLC Curtis Moore – FRESH OFF THE BOAT – 20th Century Fox Christina Myal – FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS – Voltage Pictures

Graphic Designers: Brian Grego – RIZZOLI & ISLES Brian Kuhar – Astek Wallcoverings Sarah Stimpson – THE MASON TWINS Graphic Artist: Terrence Eisenhower – KTLA Senior Illustrators: Troy Morgan – THE FANTASTIC FOUR – 20th Century Fox Jared Purrington – SAGE & MILO – Warner Bros. Scenic Artist Trainee: Russell Ramirez – Warner Bros. Electric Graphic Operator: Elaine Koehler – ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT – CBS/Paramount At the end of April, the Guild had 2212 members.

coming soon INTO THE STORM David Sandefur, Production Designer Kirsten Oglesby, Marco Rubeo, Art Directors Sean Hargreaves, Concept Artist Jamie Rama, Marc-Andre Samson, Illustrators Ellen Lampl, Graphic Designer Erick Donaldson, Bria Kinter, Set Designers Michael C. Biddle, Robert Andrew Johnson, Digital Set Designers Brana Rosenfeld, Set Decorator Opens August 8

P ER S P EC T I V E | J ULY /AU GU ST 2 0 1 4

calendar July 4 Independence Day Guild Offices Closed

July 18 & August 15 @ 7 PM Special Friday Figure Drawing Workshop Robert Boyle Studio 800

Jim Fiorito

July 20 @ 5:30 PM THE DEVILS (1971) Film Society Screening Aero Theatre in Santa Monica

July 24-27 COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL San Diego Convention Center

Photograph by Pat Loika

July 26 – 5-8 PM TUESDAY’S DRAWINGS Opening Reception Gallery 800 in North Hollywood

Pierre Bernard, Jr.

August 24 @ 5:30 PM THE GAUCHO (1927) Film Society Screening Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood

PERSP ECT IVE | JU LY/ AU G U S T 2 0 1 4

milestones BENJAMIN BAMPS 1974 – 2014 Award-winning and widely respected music video and commercial Production Designer Benjamin Bamps died suddenly on April 13, 2014. Benjamin “Benji” Bamps was born in Antwerp, Belgium, the son of international art dealers. He grew up in and around auction houses, art galleries and the diamond district, and began studying modern art and antiques at the age of 14. Three years later, he moved to New York City to work as a diamond dealer, opening his own gallery on Fifth Avenue, specializing in 18th and 19th century museum pieces. In 2001, Mr. Bamps moved to Los Angeles working as a freelance commercial Production Designer for McDonald’s, Chevrolet, John Frieda and Hugo Boss, before finding his niche as the go-to Art Director for the top strata of music video directors. Benji Bamps, with his daughter Riley, as they take a selfie.

Mr. Bamps worked on countless music videos, his reel of formidable Who’s Who of recording artists: Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Nicki Minaj, Usher, Jay Z, Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne, Santana, Celine Dion, Lenny Kravitz and Eminem, among others. At the same time, he continued designing commercials for Carl’s Jr., Volkswagen, Honda, AT&T, Sony, Miller Light, Microsoft, Toyota, Staples, Nintendo, Hardee’s and a host of other major companies with celebrated directors such as Chris Applebaum, Anthony Mandler, Wayne Isham, Marcus Raboy, Marc Webb, Chris Robinson, James Larese, Tim Story, Ray Kay, Gil Green, Jessy Terrero and Benny Boom. He also designed the haunting series of promos for American Horror Story on the FX network. The most important thing in his life was his children. As a parent, he was spontaneous and optimistic; he always took the fun and positive approach, trying to avoid saying no if he could. He taught the children his love of traveling, and his fascination with art and photography. He was, for them, just another big playful kid. Mr. Bamps’ sudden death was a terrible loss for his friends, indeed for everyone who knew him. His contagious energy made all around him laugh, and he was always inclusive, never judgmental; he didn’t care who anyone was or where they were from, he included them all. His friend Ariana Treneer wrote, “Dear Benji, I can’t believe you’re gone. I keep looking for a message you’re okay, that you’ve found peace. My heart is just broken for those sweet wild amazing children of yours, for Tara. I hope that you are out there somersaulting with the stars.” He lived, since his marriage in 2007, in Tarzana, California. His friends, his children and their friends, held a celebration of his life near his home in the San Fernando Valley with a butterfly release party, to the delight of them all. He is survived by those children, Riley (8), Logan (6) and Cash (4), his wife Tara, his sister Sophie, who lives in Miami, Florida, and his parents, who live now in Monaco.

P ER S P EC T I V E | J ULY /AU GU ST 2 0 1 4

TWO WEDDINGS Art Directors Guild Director of Operations Lydia Zimmer and Chris Prescott, a member of Studio Teamsters Local 399, were married after a five-year engagement on Saturday, April 19, 2014. Ms. Zimmer began working for the Scenic, Title and Graphic Artists Local 816 in 1992, and continued with the Guild after the 2003 merger. Art Directors Guild past president and Lifetime Achievement Award winner Bill Creber, and his longtime friend Sally Queen, eloped to the Santa Barbara Courthouse last New Year’s Eve for their “happiest new year ever.” The two first met more than fifty years ago, and found each other again in 2010. Mr. Creber is an Oscar®-, Emmy®- and BAFTA-nominated Production Designer, and Mrs. Creber is a retired mom, homemaker and banker.

PERSP ECT IVE | JU LY/ AU G U S T 2 0 1 4

reshoots

Image courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library, A.M.P. A.S.®

This gouache on board concept illustration of a Martian spacecraft, painted by Production Designer Al Nozaki for THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), shows Uncle Matthew, the local minister in Grover’s Mill, who tries to communicate with the Martians but is killed by them instead. Born in Japan, Mr. Nozaki (1912–2003) moved with his family to the United States when he was three and settled in Los Angeles. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1933, a master’s degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois in 1934, and immediately joined Hans Dreier’s Paramount Art Department as a draftsman. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Mr. Nozaki was abruptly dismissed from his job at Paramount, and interned for a year, along with his wife Lorna, at Manzanar Relocation Center in California’s Owens Valley. Mr. Nozaki worked on many films during his thirty-five years at Paramount Pictures but he is best known for his memorable designs for this film and for the biblical epic THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956), for which he received an Oscar ® nomination. He retired in 1969 as Paramount’s Supervising Art Director, suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, which would ultimately cost him his sight. He died on November 16, 2003, in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia.

P ER S P EC T I V E | J ULY /AU GU ST 2 0 1 4

Mr. Nozaki drawing storyboards based on his spacecaft designs.

TUESDAY’S DRAWINGS From “Figure Drawing from Life on Tuesdays” at the Guild

Michael Denering

Pierre PierreBernard, Bernard,Jr.Jr.

James Brown

Eduard Bendemann

July 25th – August 23rd Opening Reception – Friday July 25 – 5 to 8PM

THREE ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

ART UNITES

Robert Houghtaling, John Moffitt, Stan Olexiewicz

The 8th Member Show

Stan Olexiewicz

September 13th – October 18th Opening Reception Saturday September 13 – 5 to 8PM

November 1st – December 20th Opening Reception Saturday November 1 – 5 to 8PM

Gallery 800 Curator: Denis Olsen | Coordinator: Debbie Patton Gallery Hours: Thursday - Saturday: 2 - 8PM and Sunday: 2 - 6PM 5108 Lankershim Blvd at the Historic Lankershim Arts Center | NoHo Arts District 91601

Bold makes sure you won’t have to ask him ever again. Discover marital bliss with the Numi® toilet, complete with heated seat and foot warmer, built-in speakers and bidet, touch-screen remote, and a motion-activated lid and seat. us.KOHLER.com © 2013 Kohler Co.