Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124104
R U S S I A N D O L L | P E R S P E C T I V E 9 3 apartment is designed to have a choose-your-own adventure or video game vibe, providing lots of routes for Nadia to take. There's always a space beyond a space. That said, the world of Russian Doll has rules. There are limits. Natasha often described the world as a snowglobe, meaning that this reality has edges to it, like The Truman Show or the map of a video game. There are places she can't go. After all, it's her own trauma, her own past, that she must face in order to escape. And this world changes with each reset, first losing living things, Nadia's cat, Alan's fish, followed by all things that would rot and decay, flowers, plants, food, then people. Non-living objects were last, including furniture and, of course, mirrors. The density of color was used to show that this version of New York, this snowglobe, had limits. Early on, I started plotting the different locations on a cross-section of a Russian doll, embracing the metaphor of the concentric rings. This became a map of the show's East Village location, and the farther Nadia moved away from Maxine's loft, the more desaturated the world became. This simple tool became an important way to communicate across departments, particularly with Chris Teague (cinematographer) and Jenn Rogien (costume designer), who adopted and expanded this strategy with their own brilliant uses of light, color and texture. For example, Chris filled the basement of the Public Enemy with lots of saturated light, while Jenn dressed Alan's girlfriend Beatrice in muted tones and flat textures. Beatrice's apartment, in contrast with Maxine's colorful and dynamic loft, clearly illustrates this design strategy. The banal, black-and-whiteness of Beatrice's apartment reveals how far off course Nadia is—this lack of color showing that she's near the edge of the map. This logic also applied to Nadia and Alan's apartments. They were both equidistant from F. LOFT KITCHEN. PHOTO BY JOHN COX. G. THE LOFT DINING ROOM, PRODUCTION STILL. H. LOFT LIVING ROOM. SET PHOTO BY JOHN COX. I. BEATRICE'S APARTMENT. MOSTLY BLACK AND WHITE, WITH SIMPLE ARTWORK AND FURNISHINGS. A DIRECT CONTRAST WITH NADIA'S RESET POINT. PRODUCTION STILL. H G I F