Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538080
T H E P I T T | P E R S P E C T I V E 2 1 I felt inspired, not restrained, by the parameters. The boundaries were set from the beginning. I had an exact budget number I needed to hit. The economy of detail, distilling functions down to their essence, using every square inch—fire lane to fire lane—of our physical space, streamlined our process. In the end, we used a stage and a half, over 22,000 square feet of contiguous, 360-degree photographable space. I do remember the clear moment when the layout with cupping curves created a swirl of perpetual motion, allowing the set to have unlimited depth and not a single dead end, clicked. I swear I thought I heard a bell ring. The subsequent birth of that intensive holiday break ground plan would be the anchor forever forward. I realize now, the unique combination of trust, years of mutual respect, and an unspoken acknowledgment that I was "the one" who could fill the producers' timely need, was hubris, and was my undoing, because now I was invested and hooked. I felt a primal responsibility to keep my beloved crew working. I wanted very much to continue to develop the design and take it to maturity and was heartsick that I would have to pass it off to someone else. Fortune smiled and the production timeframe of The Pitt aligned, so I was able to do the show after all. In the spring, I arrived at my next "first" meeting, fully expecting to restart with innumerable changes to the original blueprint. Yes, Scott the showrunner gave me back the ground plan with notes and Post-its all over it, but the Post-its assigned characters to each of the specific rooms, and the notes explained choreography already in place, evolved for multiple episodes. They had been writing for months to the very same ground plan, without altering a thing! There would be no reverse engineering to accommodate fifteen different episodes' worth of geographies concocted from multiple writers' perspectives of what the space would be. The prescient plan had worked. Now my job was to take the 2D plan and make it into a 3D reality. D. STAGE 22 FLOOR PLAN. DRAWING BY DEAN WOLCOTT. E. STAGE 21 PEDESTRIAN ENTRANCE. RECEPTION WAITING ROOM "CHAIRS" AND TRIAGE. SKETCHUP MODEL BY JOSH LUSBY AND DEAN WOLCOTT. E D