Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545821
Hnedel Maximore: This collaboration started very early. From the beginning when we started production, our DP [director of photog- raphy], Darran Tiernan, shot a mini almost like student film on the Sony lot where costumes dressed up some stand-ins and recreated a couple of noir scenes. Pulling inspiration from The Killing, The Third Man, all these great noir movies, to help determine our look. Then Darran took all of these department heads into the color bay with him, with us, and they were all able to see the final effect of their choices. Which is unusual, right? Very rarely do your props, produc- tion designer, costume designer, hair and makeup ever go into the color process, because this happens usually eight or nine months aer they've wrapped. So for them to be able to see this process very early and be a part of it, they were informed and could say, "Okay, well maybe our make- up needs to be a little bit less glossy, or we need to lean into a bit more of this." And our costume designer was like, "Oh, well, now that I'm seeing what this tan suit looks like in the black-and-white version and the color version, maybe I need to push it more ecru to make it work for both versions. So there's a visual difference between the sandy skin and the look of his suit." And the same thing happens with our production designer, "I have this green wall, but in our su- per vibrant color it's starting to look like chroma green, which is what we use in visual effects to be able to take the whole keys. So maybe I need to add a bit more aqua and push it more blue. Change the saturation a bit more or tweak it so that it looks beautiful in both black-and-white and color, and I still get that effect." Props were go- ing back and aging things a bit more and adding a bit of texture. So all the department heads had to make these choices. To be a part of that process very early and help to support all the various departments was super fun. Let's talk about world-building. How did you bring 1930s New York City to life with visual effects? Hnedel Maximore: We were working very closely with our produc- tion designer, so we had a ton of references from them. We also went out and found some more references of our own and brought that to the table. It was always a conversation between the production designer, our DP, myself in visual effects, and our showrunner, to say, "Hey, when we're doing this and we're shooting this direction, this is what visual effects is responsible for. These are our references." There's a great website, oldnyc.org, where it's like a photographic time capsule. You could go on, pick a year, pick a spot on a map, and just look at all the beautiful pieces of photography people took in x year. So that was amazing to have. There's a great documentary, Men at Lunch, that shows the Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, and all of the skyscrap- ers in New York being built, and the crazy hijinks of these guys walking on suspended beams without safety gear. What the skyline looked like, how much atmosphere was in the air, how dense and thick the air was, what's visibility like at 520 blocks away, how much can you see? Pulling all of that information, texture, and references from that helped shape it. The good thing is, New York has a very iconic look. So we were able to grab a lot of that information when we were doing our set extension and doing all of our world-building.