team adding in those details like the Con Edison work sites and the steam tubes and
little subway stands, bodega signs and the halal carts … that's what sells it."
The final touch was adding some 250 background cars and NY taxis to the street
and 500 street background. "The cars meant that we didn't just have to close our
hero street … we decided to close a loop so that all of the cars could make a big
circle rather than having to back up to reset," says Daniels.
From Player to Coach
A big part of Daniel's learning curve as the SLM on so many of Sheridan's series
was going from what he calls "being a player to being the coach." Having come
up through the ranks and gone from PA to scout and then assistant to key before
moving into management, the trajectory was less about promotion and more about
a change of discipline.
As a key, he had personally handled permits, neighbors and on-set problems. As
a Department Head, he admits that he had to learn how to stop doing everything
and build a team who could handle it all. "It was challenging for me to make the
transition, but I already had a deep bench of amazing people to staff up with and, as
it happens, we'd all just sort of rotate around one another on these projects."
On these shows, logistics become the department's private calculation. A scout is
tasked with finding the most distinctive place possible, even if reaching it may require
ATVs or pack animals.
At the same time, an experienced scout is quietly considering access, neighbors,
conservation, base camp, camera placement and whether hundreds of crew and
background performers can be supported without destroying what made a location
desirable in the first place.
The process always values specificity over convenience. "We go where the
locations are," LM Knaus says. "Location is king."
Kraus came up in the same Austin circle as Daniels, and the two initially met on
the first season of Friday Night Lights which began a professional exchange in which
the two would hire each other over the years. Their shared skills even crossed over
into live-event production for the South by Southwest film festival where finding
venues for various events would mean solving many of the same challenges a film or
television project would face: Access, security, police, sanitation and neighborhood
impact.
The landed Technocrane. Photo by Dustin Daniels/LMGI
