Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531774
6 4 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 5 of twisted metal or not? The answers were there, obliquely, but only if you knew that there even needed to be three levels of aftermath. Getting the crew on the same page, literally and visually, became a top priority. Our standard site plan and director's plan formats suddenly didn't seem detailed enough. How would a stressed out, busy person best digest this information? If I were one of our set dressers or even a set PA who hadn't read the script but is being told to go to the "rebar car" when there's literally four different ones, how can I help them all do their jobs, with the skills I have and the information that is my responsibility to communicate? Asking myself these questions compelled me to create a mega site plan with an integrated schedule—including story beats—to illustrate what was shooting when and where. It may have been too detailed for some, but for others it was a game changer. This document was digitally distributed, printed at 11x17 and handed out liberally to any crew member that seemed interested, some of who even requested ARCH D copies to hang in their trailers. This mega site plan format returned by popular demand whenever we had a complex sequence. Not the Hill to Die On That said, no matter how thoroughly one plans, sometimes things still don't go smoothly. This was the case when the crew tried to "strew jack-knifed train cars over a hillside" like the script instructed. As if finding train cars that we could strew—and an appropriate hill—wasn't hard enough, even with the help of a giant crane (the kind used to build skyscrapers), the cars weren't staying in place. Although the two real train cars we brought to set were selected for being the lightest options, we were still dealing with a 52-foot gondola car (weighing thirty-five thousand pounds) and a 60-foot steel flatbed. The train cars were crucial to selling our pile of debris as a train wreck and we needed to show that they were train cars by revealing their undercarriage. In short, we wanted to place the train cars on the sides and in specific blocking laid out by our director. Turns out model train cars stay on foam model hills in weird angles a lot better than they do in real life. Not only was the process slow and the crane's time expensive but the heavy rain, slope of the hill and the laws of physics weren't working in our favor. So, when I checked in with Art Director Josh Dobkin about how it was going over text that day, he responded in his much-appreciated dry sense of humor that this was the hill he was going to die on. Luckily, he didn't. And luckily, he problem-solved how to weigh the gondola down with gravel and set A. TRAIN DERAILMENT SHOWING THE REAL GONDOLA CAR THAT WAS CRANED IN. SET PHOTO. B. TRAIN WRECK DEBRIS FIELD REFLECTING THE SECOND LEVEL OF AFTERMATH SHOWING THE TRAIN WRECKAGE, ALONG WITH TWISTED METAL AND CHARRED SET PIECES FROM THE TANKER EXPLOSION. SET PHOTO. C. TRAIN CAR BEING CRANED INTO PLACE. SET PHOTO. D. TRAIN SET PIECE IN PROGRESS IN THE MILL AT FOX STUDIOS. MADE FOR THE CONDUCTOR RESCUE SHOT ON REAL TRAIN TRACKS IN FILLMORE. C A B D