Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/780285
58 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 7 whole thing digital often feels like animation to me and I rarely completely buy it as real. But the small touches that visual effects can bring to our work can really complete the picture. They can make it feel very real. When you're designing a character's personal space like a home or office, how do you get inside the mind of that character? I ask a lot of questions, and then usually the writers want me to leave. [Laughs]. I ask things like, what's their annual income? Where'd they go to school? What level of education did they complete? Do they have a favorite sports team? What are their hobbies? And with some of those things, you start to see connections, you start to connect the dots and bring it into the physical world. The tone of Designated Survivor feels very down to earth. Did you have any stylistic choices that deviated from reality? There were a few movie references that we slipped in. Paul was very keen on Michael Ritchie's The Candidate and Paul Greengrass's United 93. The are also a couple of [Stanley] Kubrick references in there. He dealt with the same kind of themes: espionage, government and abuse of power. If you look at the wallpaper in the FBI safe room at the beginning of the show, it references the carpet pattern from The Shining. And near the end, you've got the war room, which was inspired by Ken Adams, the designer behind Dr. Strangelove, by his great war room set. But Paul wanted the FBI safe room to be like a room from the Cold War era, so we referenced the Diefenbunker, a Cold War bunker up in Canada where the Canadian government is taken if there's ever a nuclear event. We used that as a visual prototype and then started adding the details, looking at David Hicks. It just so happened that Kubrick used Hick's patterns in The Shining, so we said, "Wow, that's a happy accident. Let's put that in there and see if anybody notices." So the show opens with a Kubrick reference, and closes with a Kubrick reference. Which piece of work are you most proud of from Designated Survivor? The West Wing of the White House. We were very accurate in our visual representations while also engineering it for complex camera choreography, and yet it still feels very much like the real White House. I think creating the ground plan for that unit set was one of the most challenging parts of the show. We shot a lot of the motorcade on stage and set it up so the SUV's and emergency vehicles could pull right up to the doors of the West Wing and get ushered in by the security team. Working all that stuff out with Paul over a two-day period was pivotal to the shooting strategy of the show. It made it possible for everybody to realize how we were finally going to do this. If you were to physically walk through the set, you'd probably see the differences between it and reality. What Paul was trying to create on camera was a highly charged visceral moment, when Kirkman first walks into the White House and all the staffers are looking at their phones and televisions. Everyone's in a complete state of shock at the loss of the President and the Congress. They're now looking at him for the first time as their President. And the only way we could've done that was to create a strategic pathway for the camera to move through the set, and to catch these glimpses Top: The Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) control room set under construction, with its upper-level security overlook fabricated out of steel. Much of this was cut by the CNC machine directly from the Art Department's SketchUp files, and the existing concrete ceiling of the former Canadian Air Force Cold War era facility was utilized as the finished roof of this set. Above: A SketchUp model by Set Designer John Kim of the PEOC set showing an overhead view of the control room and the Joint Chiefs meeting table.