Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1043753
8 6 P E R S P E C T I V E | N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 location craft builds and miniatures helped the sense of reality. The distant locations like Iceland gave drama to the image. He was surprised to learn that the Tesseract from Interstellar was a large stage build with CGI extensions. First Man was shot primarily in Atlanta, mixed with Cape Canaveral and California. I needed to convince our producers that the Art Department could handle designing and building the miniatures, as well as dealing with a craft mounted camera unit for all the exterior docking and undocking scenes between Gemini, Apollo and the lunar lander. First Man was going to be a complex shoot. To get the authenticity of the event, the Gemini and Apollo missions would have to be recreated, including faking the Moon landing. The summer of 2016 was spent part time at the Temple Hill Production offices in Los Angeles, myself, Damien Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren trying to figure out a methodology for the film. We knew we could find all of the Houston and El Lago neighborhoods in Atlanta, and many of the NASA interiors as well, although I was determined to go to the real Mission Control for a moment of reality and respect for the men and women who had made these events happen. Linus came up with using a giant semi-circular LED screen for all the interior craft views in the Earth and lunar orbit instead of the front projection system used on Interstellar. I suggested we use miniatures and full-size exterior craft for Gemini, Apollo, Lunar Module and Agena for docking scenes on stage in front of the LED screen. Capturing as much as we could "in camera." Saturn V and the Titan rockets with their launch pads would go to miniatures. White rooms and exterior craft entry points would be location builds. All that was needed were link pieces to cut in with the miniatures to help sell the event. Such as elevators up to the launch towers and bridges to white rooms, if these could be shot on location with real horizons and atmosphere, that would really help. The location department got permission to build the Apollo 11 gantry and the very top of the Saturn V rocket on the roof of a 200-foot tall power station roof structure with skyline views and natural steam rising from the plant below. The last item was the Moon. I did not want that on stage. The light source would need to be as high and powerful as possible to get the hard shadows needed. No stage would give the size needed to let the moonscape fall off to black and avoid green screen. The Moon landing ended up being shot at a giant gray quarry that the owner and greens department sculpted to match Tranquility Base. It became clear to the filmmaking team that we could not rely on any one method to create the imagery we needed and the reality we wanted. The first thing I always do is create my wall. I put every scene in script order on the wall and find a visual explanation of that scene, whether it be a written idea, a thought sketched out, a reference photo or a location. I like to do this with the director and a large-scale printer so we can discover the world together. As the design progresses, the room grows with illustrations, models and drawings from the Art Department. This room hopefully explains the look and feel of the picture and the methodology we plan to use. It's a place for all departments and the studio to help explain the task at hand. I am sure many designers use this method, but I feel it's one of the most fun and creative times we have as an Art Department, all working together discovering the film in early preproduction. The film had the usual array of sets, locations, NASA sites and NASA offices, including Mission Control. We also had the many missions and flight training facilities to produce, including X-15, Geminis 5 and 8, Titan and Saturn launch pads, LLTV trainer, a multi-axis trainer, Apollo 1 and 11, and the Lunar Module and the Moon landing. It meant dividing up the Art Department. My team, led by Erik Osusky, along with Jenne Lee, Rory Bruen and Thomas Valentine, accomplished an astonishing amount of work in a very short time. They recruited many Assistant Art Directors, Set Designers and Model Makers who knocked it out. Ben Nowicki supervised the miniature build and Ian Hunter supervised the shoot.