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46 dga quarterly STARTING UP: (top to bottom) Containment is the latest of David Nutter's many pilots; director-producer Julie Anne Robinson (left) worked six days a week on the pilot for The Catch; director-producer Joe Chappelle spun off two backdoor pilots, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med, from Chicago Fire; (opposite) Chris Grismer adapted The Vampire Diaries for the backdoor pilot of The Originals. PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) QUANTRELL COLBERT/THE CW; RYAN GREEN/ABC; ELIZABETH MORRIS/NBC It really established the energy of the show through action." Backdoor pilots usually get twice as much production time as an ordinary episode, and require extensive pre- production, two weeks or more. (Tra- ditional pilots are accorded a far longer preproduction period, usually about eight weeks.) "Production enhancement is neces- sary," says NBC Entertainment Presi- dent Jennifer Salke, "you need to deliver a satisfying episode for fans of the existing show but also sell a new world of char- acters and stakes. The Chicago-based shows have an organic way to do that given the natural handoff between fire- fighters, police, and medical personnel." "The network articulated very early on that you need to create a new template for a show that can go off and be its own individual thing," Chappelle says. "Even though you're introducing characters, it's still an episode of Chicago Fire. But you end up with a large en- semble, because you're introducing a half-dozen new characters. It's very crowded, very dense." Med's backdoor pilot took place in a hospital emergency room in lockdown because of a potential contagion after an explosion; some characters were locked in the building, others outside. "Action was going on in different areas of the same set, so there was a lot of cross- cutting," Chappelle recalls. "We shot it a little wider, so you'd feel some of that other business in the background. The widest lens we use on Fire is 15 mm, but for Med, we went to a 10 mm lens. It kept the environment a character in the show. But generally, in this uni- verse, you want to create a unity among the shows. They have to have the same sort of palette." Chris Grismer had a much different challenge on The CW teen drama The Vampire Diaries when the producers sought to create the spinoff The Originals. While the Chicago dramas are all aimed at es- sentially the same audience, The Originals sought to appeal to viewers who never watched Vampire Diaries. "We were aiming at a more adult audience," Grismer explains. "It's tricky, because the episode exists in the Vampire Diaries world. But I used hand-cranked 35 mm cameras and triple-exposed the film. We created a new take on the violence, took it up a level. We changed the color palette a little bit when we went to New Orleans [Vampire Diaries shoots in Georgia]. We approached it like everything was de- caying a little bit. We made it look a little rougher, a little more adult." Grismer also directed the first episode of The Originals, which took place the same night as the backdoor pilot, but from the point of view of a different character. His planning for the pilot was thorough enough that he could use footage from it for that first episode. "I'm in a situation where, every year, I get a chance to do something dif- ferent. I get to test my abilities and stretch my knowledge of what I do. I like the excitement of making a pilot." —DAVID NUTTER