Coffee and Celluloid

WWII, Blood Production Design, and Star Wars - Mid-Week Coffee Break

Posted April 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am by C47

Richard Hammond Presents Bloody Omaha [Indy Mogul] - Really awesome video featuring the power of compositing. 3 actors + After Effects = Saving Private Ryan. It features Richard Hammond, one of the hosts of Top Gear, which is a show you should check out if you haven’t. I’m not a big car fan and I still love it.

If You Need a Past, He’s the Guy to Build It - NY Times article on Jack Fisk, production designer for There Will Be Blood. After reading this I was rooting for him for the Oscar. Sadly he didn’t.

Besides building and dressing sets — to help the actors stay in character, every room of every building was fully outfitted — it also fell to the film’s art department to devise a credible stand-in for oil. Mr. Fisk combined food coloring with methylcellulose, a thickener
sometimes used as a food additive. It is an ingredient in a McDonald’s McFlurry dessert, he said. “You can buy it by the trainload.”

On “There Will Be Blood,” in an intriguing corollary to Mr. Day-Lewis’s method acting, Mr. Fisk and his team often practiced a kind of method building. These modest structures were built as they might have been in a small frontier town, starting with the use of salvage lumber. To build the ranch house, “I got together about five carpenters,” he said. “I didn’t have any plans, and I told them not to bring levels. We just marked the space and started laying the foundation. I figured that’s the way they would have done it then.”

Lost Star Wars Scene [The Editblog]