Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/780285
P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 7 55 Top: A wild wagon wall photograph of the Oval Office set, showing how overhead crane shots were designed and achieved by opening up large sections of the set. A full ceiling with integrated LED cove lighting was installed for low wide angles shot on an 18mm lens. Center: The Oval Office door leading to the President's private dining room. A diagonal lattice pattern wallpaper was chosen to give the room's shape better definition. Bottom: Kiefer Sutherland as President Tom Kirkman in the Oval Office set with a view of the South Lawn green set outside the windows. carpeting, which is also a Hicks pattern. So, in a funny way, the pilot opens and closes with a nod to Kubrick." FORBES Magazine – Noverber 6, 2016 Interview by Dani Di Placido You've worked previously on Scrubs, Extant and Smash. How do you like working on a political thriller? Well, for me, it's been fantastic because it combined all the things I've been interested in for most of my life. History, art, architecture and politics. I'm a bit of a political junkie. I got to team up with a fantastic creative team: [director] Paul McGuigan, [producer] Mark Gordon and of course, Kiefer Sutherland. And once I read the script, I realized it was going to be a great opportunity for any designer. It has a political story at its core, but also it was a family drama and a bit of a procedural, set in a place that we're all very familiar with. How did you and your design team prepare for Designated Survivor? Well, the initial production strategy was to shoot in Washington, DC, for three days, pick up a lot of the well-known exteriors there, and then we would shoot interiors in Toronto. But Paul McGuigan wanted to have more control over how the camera moved through spaces and how key emotional moments were revealed, and he wanted it to be quite intimate at times. So at the last minute, it was decided to build it all, pretty much most of the West Wing of the White House, including the Oval Office, on the Downsview Stages in Toronto. To do that accurately required considerable research. We went into the White House archives and pulled a lot of hand-drawn architectural drawings from past renovations. We looked at photographs, film footage. And then we were granted a private tour of the White House. One of the writing producers on the show, Rich Klein, is a partner at McLarty Associates in Washington, DC. Mack McLarty was President Clinton's Chief of Staff, and now has his own consulting firm, so through Rich, we were able to get valuable access to key people and places of interest. It was at 9:30 one night. President Obama was in Los Angeles at the