Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546638
8 I D G A M O N T H L Y SCREENPULLS: WARNER BROS. & HBO The family gets to a garage for a moment of safety. Some high piano notes mix with the guitar hum to create an emotional shift — it's a goodbye scene, and they're a close, loving family. There's another family ready to escape in their car. Will's parents think they're all escaping together, but there's no room, so his dad empties the trunk and puts Will inside. Here, Will's father is writing a note that he puts in his son's pocket, which will stay with him for the next hundred years and become a key prop revealed at the end of the pilot. I went for the silhouette to keep what he's writing so urgently mysterious. I like layers of things in the background — the light blows out behind him as the other man opens the garage doors, and you hear screams and terror again. There are always layers of action. Nowhere is safe anymore. 7 The mother puts on a brave face. The father tells his son not to suck his thumb, hides him in the trunk, and puts the note in his pocket. It's not over-romanticized. We had the camera in the trunk to capture the father shutting the lid and closing the boy in — his last image of his father before he is ripped away from his family. 8 We built a box with a removable side so the camera could be in there with the boy. The grips shook the box to simulate the car driving away. Bullets pierce the box, terrifying him. We used squibs to blow out these little holes and created plugs that we could pull. The boy looks out and sees an airplane flying over the garage and gas station where his parents are. The pilot drops a Molotov cocktail, striking the gas station. 9 The gas station blows up in Will's POV, and we cut hard to black as the boy is knocked out by the psychological impact. The location followed a real path from the theater — we went down the block, took two lefts, and this is the back alley from where we started. This shot was a combination of visual and practical effects. We set cameras to capture the stunt, cleared the set, and created a big explosion with a lot of dust — though we didn't actually blow up a structure. We enhanced the material flying at us with VFX. Like the title, the dissonant electric-guitar hum of Trent and Atticus's score was essential to cueing that we're looking at one genre but are really in another. The contradiction of not using period instruments added to the discomfort and horror of what we're experiencing and foreshadowed where we're going. 10 SHOT TO REMEMBER Continued from page 7. — Director Nicole Kassell on Watchmen. See more images and text from this article online at www.dga.org.