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 47 placement house and talked directly to companies asking for merchandise to fill the store. With great support from Universal Television, we came up with a workable agreement for vendors that protected everyone's interest and allowed us to furnish the store with real product. To date, I think there are somewhere north of twenty-five hundred clearance agreements, and the number is still growing. It's truly astonishing. The amount of merchandise that arrived was staggering: four or five semi-loads some days. It's amazing how much product it takes to fill two hundred feet of pharmacy shelves, let alone a whole store. Jim McDermott and his crew of set dressers worked seven days a week for months. At one point, Cynthia had two decorators, three shoppers, four product placement persons (including Janine Cavoto who had to keep track of it all), a clearance coordinator, three PAs and twenty set dressers. In half-hour television, that is a very large crew. It was an all-hands-on-deck effort. Property master Phil Shea helped with product acquisitions in addition to setting up all of the props for the show. He coordinated the loan of all of the functioning checkout computers and scanners, and so much more. Filling the store with product was one thing; filling a store with graphics was another huge undertaking. Tim Swope put forth a herculean effort to get the store signage completed. You really can't appreciate the sheer volume of graphics in a store until you have done one. The large signage is easy to appreciate, but once you get past the 30-foot banners and 4-foot Sunny Savings signs, you get into the stuff that sometimes goes unnoticed: specific item signs, descriptions and pricing. You have to layer-in the details—sales and promotional signs, vendor specific and vendor non-specific signs, and even the individual pricing strips on the gondola shelves. All this, on top of developing a custom line of Supercloud products, the in-store brand. I am having anxiety just writing about everything. Well done, graphics team! Three weeks to go and we are in the homestretch. Semi-loads and more semi-loads of product arrived every day and the crew was working seven days a week to get the set ready for August 10, 2015: Day 1, Episode 102. When Ruben, Justin, writers Jonathan Green and Gabe Miller and the rest of the writing staff arrived on set, day one, to greet the cast and crew...it was all worthwhile. You could see the cast was transported into the world of Cloud 9 Superstore. The store's exterior was christened on episode three, and other sets continued to be completed through all ten episodes of season one. Top: The housewares and grocery departments. Above: The Cloud 9 "Chesterfi eld Store," a redress of the hero St. Louis-based store altered to include an extensive produce section. A set like Cloud 9 is never really finished. It's designed to be organic and flexible and has to change seamlessly to fit the demands of the script. Cinematographer Jay Hunter and I had many conversations about the set and how the show would shoot. When the fluorescent lights are turned on, the set is ninety percent lit. Jay and his team built fixtures that can live an aisle or two away from the scene and still light the actors as needed. It's a huge part of the look, style, flexibility and functionality of the set. The Superstore set has become quite the celebrity here at Universal Television. Other shows, like The Mindy Project,