Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/780285
Nixon's Oval Office. The color palette, floor pattern and the decor came from President Reagan. We referenced Obama's Oval Office with the patterning on the walls. He brought in Michael Smith to help put his Oval Office together. It was the first time that stripes had been used on the walls of the Oval Office, which meant you could now see the geometry of the room. When it's monochromatic, painted in shades of white, you can't really read the shape of the room very well. Put a pattern on there and the radius of the room really starts to present itself. So we ended up using a kind of lattice pattern on the walls. It was kind of a multi- administration mash-up with ideas from many decades, but all rooted in reality. So how much did 9/11 influence Designated Survivor's disaster scene? Well, I was in New York during that time. I had a design studio on Fulton Street in the shadow of the World Trade Center in 2001 so I was pretty close to it all. Most people don't know this but much of the first lighting at ground zero after it all happened came from volunteer New York film crews; they drove their trucks and generators to ground zero with theatrical lights—10Ks, 20Ks. There was no power downtown as everything had been knocked out, so the documentary photographs taken the first week at ground zero were lit by theatrical lighting—it's all very dramatic. So our references for the ground zero scenes were mostly inspired by the night photography of 9/11. Everybody picking through the rubble, the smoke, the haze. And the silence. Everybody doing their solemn work. 9/11 is referenced in the pilot because ours is also a catastrophic event, and a lot of the same triggers would have gone off if this really happened at the US Capitol. Rich said one of the things he remembered the most about 9/11 in was that the entire sky in Washington, DC, was lit up with red light because they had the Pentagon to deal with and so security crews put flares down in all the intersections so that the emergency vehicles could fly through uninterrupted. In our show, we directly referenced those visual clues by putting red flares out on the roadways when we shot our motorcade sequence. How much of the Capitol Hill ground zero set was digital and how much was physical? The Capitol Hill set was one-third physical and two-thirds digital. The entire foreground was all physical and constructed exterior set work just outside of the stages in Toronto. More and more often with Production Design these days, we'll start with a smaller foreground physical piece and the virtual team will extend it to our specifications. We design and pre-visualize the entire set design in the Art Department first, but the visual effects artists take our designs to the final level in post production. I personally prefer physical scenery whenever you can do it. Making the Top to bottom: The Oval Office foyer set, a reproduction of the space between the Oval Office and the Roosevelt Room. This is the destination for Tom Kirkman's walk into the building where he is sworn in as President by the Madam Justice. The West Wing corridor set under construction; and the same corridor finished and dressed for day one of principal photography. The diplomatic reception room was redressed as the Queen's Bedroom in the East Wing. By introducing a wall plug to mask the mural, repainting and redressing the room, the set was turned around in twenty-four hours.