Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/747534
Relying on Photoshop and Illustrator ® , Graphic Artists were able to graft parts and pieces of a younger and more dapper Nick Nolte into vintage historic photos of all types. Art Department assistant Meghan Noce had to manage a huge database of potential and repurposed imagery, and department coordinator Mark Lee had a massive number of artworks and photos to license and clear through the usual legal and approval channels. Fine artists, Walter Lab and Victoria Carlson had the unenviable task of creating a number of large official portraits of the first family using bits and pieces of old photos—shards really, of poorly composed and lit photos—of the actors, using reference sources from both historic and contemporary paintings. Like in baseball, there is no crying allowed in the Art Department of an episodic production; no one's going to listen or care anyway. Our approach was much like that of a short-order cook at a Waffle House: serve it up as fast as the order comes in. Everyone had to stay on their A-games and yell at the stars as they drove home at night. Today, all of us working in every area of scripted entertainment share many of the same working tools and visual standards: we are all migrating toward capturing content at 4K resolution; the quality of the finished work is more closely aligned than ever before in our history. Time, budget and scope are the only differences distinguishing one type of production from another. We have rapidly evolved to a point where features, limited series, episodic one-hour and half-hour content are all being viewed on smartphones, pads, computers and all manner of digital screens, both small and large, often at the same time and in many different places around the world. Graves proved to be an exhausting but satisfying challenge for all of those who shared in its realization. As designers, we now have the ability to more effectively create and evolve our design concepts, manage our workflow and better determine the final realization of our efforts. Robust digital tools and software packages are now ubiquitous and easily accessible. But that doesn't mean that the work has become easier, because with these new tools come new challenges and endless learning curves. Today, the impossible is more possible than ever before. Creatively, it is a great time to be working in the Art Department. ADG Top: The interior of a G-4 private presidential jet, which was purchased, modified and trucked in from the high- desert airplane graveyard in California City, became another permanent set. Above: Two photographs of one of the more character-filled swing sets, the home of Sammy Vega (Callie Hernandez), President Graves' muse, a heavily tattooed small-town waitress, living in a desert trailer park with her weed-dealing boyfriend. Below: First daughter Olivia trashes the posh home of her wealthy ex-husband, tellingly named William Rockefeller (Howard Ferguson Jr.).