Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1438629
The Producers and Synecdoche, New York. Together, we made a planwhile eb fi nished her current proect, would do an intensie scoutdesign advance preproduction period in the summer of before leaing for rance with es. Then eb would start the main rt epartment in the winter while was away, returning for a followup scout over the Christmas hiatus. This turned out to work perfectly. aron urit and headed off scouting while Illustrator Hugh Sicotte (an old friend from seeral fi lms and leios hrysikos a fantastic concept artist eb introduced me to began initial sketches. We worked on a combination of stage sets like arias fi re escape and nita and ernardos apartment, as well as uick location workoers to show how they would be modifi ed to fi t the story and period. fter a few weeks took the basic idea of the production out to show Steven. We had a lot to move forward with—several main locations and the bones of our key sets. I was starting to break down Tony Kushner's extraordinary new script. He kept the spirit of the original play, but rearranged the song order and added entirely new dialogue that gave the story een more intensity. e moed ool, for instance, from after the rumblean instruction to lay low after the killing—to become a tense decision point between iff and Tony, literally challenging each other oer a gun, and of course, metaphorically challenging each other over their friendship and loyalty. Tony set ool in one of the decaying westside piers. The real piers are long gone, but we fi gured out an idea in Sunset ark, rooklyn. There are some old warehouses at the edge of the rier. The thought was, we could make our own pier—taking the space between warehouses as the approach and then elevating a platform. ed build the twistedfallen beams and structure practically from steel (the tangled steel was sculpted in the air by a tremendous NYC metal team lead by en hite and ae cllister and use isual eff ects augmentation to add the water underneath. n that way, we could hae our cake and eat it too—shooting in a fairly-controlled outdoor location, but on the safety of a fully built set on dry land. A. ANITA AND BERNARDO'S APARTMENT. ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXIOS CHRYSIKOS. B. ANITA AND BERNARDO'S APARTMENT. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 3D STUDIOMAX MODEL. THIS WAS TO EXPLAIN THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE APARTMENT TO ACCOMPANY THE SKETCHES. A B C D