Gotta give it up to these folk for making it real

In an earlier post, I alluded to how impressed I am at the effort made to make the shows look real.  I mean, we all know this is TV and movies, and not real but, WOW,  the work that location, set designers, set maintenance, and background directors take to bring an extraordinary level of nuance to the filming is really worth writing about.  I just have to give them a SHOUT OUT.  I’ll give just two examples that will give you a good sense of what I am talking about.

For the segment of Billions I was background, the set was located on the 21st floor of an office building on Wall Street.  Location had redone a very large office area to look like a busy District Attorney’s office.  It all starts when we got off the elevator to that floor.  On the walls are pictures of Obama, the governor of NY, a copy of the official US seal, an American Flag, and a variety of other official looking memorabilia on the walls.  The walls are done up in rich wood paneling.  Once you enter the actual office, there are 30 or 40 desks lined up and on EACH desk there is a fake phone, fake computer mouse, a computer screen with the contents of the screen preprogrammed and remote controlled so that the screen shot changes every 15 minutes or so.  The screen shots are of official looking documents and charts and graphs.  Then there is a basket of files, a desk lamp, pencils, pens, sticky note pads, and paper clips.  They then take it another step higher, adding personalized items to each desk, with each desk having different little doodads on them—we are talking 30 to 40 desks.  Mine had a snow globe of NYC, a little birds nest, and lots of personal sticky notes attached to my computer screen that had reminders on them like—don’t forget dentist appointment at 3pm, Rick stop stealing my office supplies—I know it’s you (that was my favorite), Call the accounting office, Pick up dry cleaning on Thursday.  Location goes to this much detail for EVERY SINGLE desk. The chances of any of this level of detail being seen is so exponentially small.  They also add things like bike helmets, umbrellas, galoshes next to various desks.  Some desks had cup of noodle container, food take out containers, bottled juices, family pictures of kids, etc.  What a dedication to detail.  I will say that when I walked in, I really felt I had walked into an office where people had been working together for years with all the kinds things that get accumulated over the years. They had pictures of softball teams and trophies on shelves and file cabinets.  It conveyed such a deep feeling of camaraderie and yet a week before, NONE OF THIS EXISTED.   I will say, creating that atmosphere, whether the detail is ever seen or not in the final version of the that episode, does bring a remarkable element for setting the mood and getting the most out of the scene from the background actors.  I really liked my snow globe and bird nest and all my little stickies on my computer screen….it brought home a lot of memories of all the little momentos I kept on my own desk when I was working and I was always about putting reminder stickies all around my computer screen.  It just didn’t feel like much of a stretch for us as a group of extras who had never met each other before to come together and feel like a real working office. Very cool.

For the Law and Order episode, they were filming a scene taking place in a court room.  Only the principle actors were in that room being filmed.  The reason they hired 10 Extras as lawyer and secretary types is because there are two sets of doors in that court room's perpendicular walls. These doors may be seen in the background while the main scene is being filmed.  One set of doors is closed but has opaque windows and the other set of doors is left open.  What we were asked to do as Extras was to walk back and forth at various intervals past these doors so that it looked like there was a variety of business going on just outside the courtroom.  They issued us each a leather briefcase from props and had us carrying those as we walked back and forth.  I started with walking past the door with the opaque windows—it was really unbelievable to me that they were trying to capture shadows of us walking past those windows.  We did one take and the background director said the windows were too opaque to capture any shadows and moved us to the open doors. 

From there, it was a highly orchestrated timing of passing back and forth---sometimes it was in pairs, other times alone, other times we were to stop and act like we were discussing a case, etc.  All the while, THE CAMERAS ARE COMPLETELY POINTED ON THE PRINCIPLE ACTORS.  It may be that you can see us if they choose to go with a long shot of that conversation in the courtroom but they could also very well choose to go with a tight shot of their argument leaving no room in the shot for anything other than the actors themselves.  It’s all about atmosphere—it really helps the principle actors get into the scene.  I love the obsessiveness of it all, the attention to detail and getting it right.

Okay, I said two examples, but here is a short third one.  On the set of Blue Bloods, they just couldn’t get the lighting right in one of the scenes in a small office, so they asked set maintenance to come in and take down a set of blinds, pop out a window, and move a wall.  Just like that, the set maintenance people go in, do their thang and voila, lightening problem solved in about 10 minutes.  There are always 2 or 3 set maintenance folks around for quick fixes.  I would say that half of them are women.