Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/891583
74 P E R S P E C T I V E | N OV E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7 (Art Department coordinator). Jan brought in rock star Brent Rice as her lead man. I was able to bring on people whose work I had admired and tried to hire in the past: Karen TenEyck as our graphic designer, Chris Snyder as construction coordinator and prop master Matt Cavaliero. I was also going to be able to work with Tom Brown as charge scenic, whom I hadn't been fortunate enough to connect with since Always in 1989. Christa, Jan and I joined the costume designer, Jenny Eagan, in the process of putting together the palette for the film. We wanted colors evocative of the era used in an eerily disturbing way. Colors that in daylight reflected contemporary exuberance and optimism, but assumed a troubling noir quality at night. Once again, it was an iterative process. We started with givens: neighborhood houses or locations that didn't need to be repainted (or that we couldn't afford to repaint), picture cars that couldn't be repainted, or colors and textures we felt would strongly anchor sets in a specific time and psychological space. Christa has a wonderful collection of paint samples from her father's architectural practice of the period, and Jan made daily discoveries on her forays to prop houses and on eBay. For my part, I love building digital study models of sets to try different color and lighting combinations, using SketchUp and V-Ray. The Meyers' house was fairly simple: shades of grey with a brown car, using earth tones as accents for the interior decor seemed appropriate in telling the story of a black family trying to blend in on a street of white families living in colorful pastel houses. The Lodge colors were a little more complex. I experimented with color combinations in my model, rendering both day and night versions and settled on a shade of green to give a disturbing undertone. Any designer knows that great design can only be realized with great execution. That's why we love and cherish our Art Departments, construction and paint departments, and set decoration departments. Any cinematic designer knows that collectively, all those great people can deliver masterful sets on the day A B