#productiondesign – Page 4

Michael Novotny

January 18, 2010 Tom Lisowski 3 comments

Michael Novotny worked with James Cameron on True Lies and Terminator 2 and production designed K-19: The Widowmaker for Kathryn Bigelow. With these $100 million features under his belt, he moved on to designing a series of episodics including Better Call Saul, The Affair, and seven seasons of the hit CBS crime drama The Mentalist…

AS: What first got you into the field?
MN: Probably painting. I always painted, starting around 14. And then in our small town of 3,000 I was able to get a free pass to the movies for 6 months at a time by doing very bizarre, outrageous cartoons. The cartoons depicted what happened on the balconies and in the main seating area when a bunch of animal-like teenagers came in. The manager liked them so much he would put them up in his office and I could get in for nothing. So that was my first commercial art deal. I was a kid -you’re just trying to be cool. That’s when I found out that art was cool!

And then I was fortunate enough to move to a town near Pittsburg that had a high school where they could offer advanced art. We did subjects like intaglio etching. We had very high-pressure presses, kilns; we did stained glass. From there I went to Goddard College in Vermont, which was a very experimental college with a very small campus of maybe 200 people. David Mamet was my dorm mate. There were no grades, you designed your own courses. I studied the bushmen and Kalahari by producing large sand paintings, 8 by 16 feet. When I left Goddard I went to the University of Pittsburgh and I went into premedical studies. I did a lot of physics and chemistry and that sort of thing. But soon I’d had enough and I left and went to England. I started a communal theater company, Footsbarn Theater, with a group of friends from Goddard College. It’s still going in France.

AS: Were you involved in set-building there?
MN: Totally. I was painting, we did a lot of sculpting. We wrote all our own pieces. They were folk tales of rural England -tales and legends of the giants, the formations of St. Michael’s mount, King Arthur’s castle, Camelot. Everybody had to do everything and I was really much better at painting than at performing. But everyone had to have their time on stage. I did that for about 4 years in England and then we did 6 years based out of Amsterdam. We did almost every Western European city. From North Africa all the way through to Scandinavia.

Daniel Novotny

January 1, 2010 Tom Lisowski One comment

A second generation production designer, Daniel Novotny made a name for himself with the insanely popular TV show CSI. It was both the most watched program on television and the most watched scripted show at various times in its fifteen seasons. He has worked nonstop since then, designing back-to-back episodics including Gotham, The Arrangement, and Outer Banks…

AS: What was your first introduction to the field of production design and art department in general?
DN: I was building models and miniatures in my dad’s model shop. He made underwater effects for Jaws 3D –that was his first movie. I cut the foam and made latex molds, sharks, and plants. So I learned about fake plants -I learned about spraying them and painting them.

Then I was on a Barbie Doll commercial with my dad. I might have been ten or twelve. They were shooting into this little glass tank where Barbie was on the beach. They carved out the bottom, which was Plexiglas. It looked cool to me but when they got the camera set up they couldn’t shoot it because of the the glossy reflection on the bottom of the Plexiglas, underneath the water. So they had to empty out all the sand and put in black paper. The black paper got wet but it didn’t matter because now they could shoot it. So I learned about coming up with art department solutions kind of young.

One of my dad’s early production design jobs was when he was working for this visual effects company 4Ward Productions. For features sometimes they subcontract out these big visual effects shots, they’ll give you a check for like $300,000 and in return they get the sequence. You know that shot in Terminator 2 where Sarah looks through the fence and imagines the explosion and it’s like the end of the world? My dad was the production designer for that visual effects shot -just that shot. So that was the first time I realized that, as a production designer, he’s actually not really making anything but he’s still responsible for it. So he did all the drawings of all the palm trees bending over and all the houses being blown away and he designed the sequence. That was pretty cool. And over the years I just watched him work as an art director and as a production designer and saw the way the whole system worked.

Television

John Muto

January 1, 2010 Tom Lisowski 2 comments

John Muto designed one of the biggest live-action comedies of all time, Home Alone. His extensive list of features also includes one of my own personal favorites from the eighties, River’s Edge. He worked with director James Cameron on Terminator II/3D and visual artist H.R. Giger on Species. We grabbed lunch while he was co-teaching production design at AFI with the late Hitchcock art director luminary Bob Boyle.

AS: What brought you into production design in the first place?
JM: You know for me, my training is entirely in writing- I have no design training whatsoever. I got out of college and I always wanted to be a writer. I don’t know if I wanted to be a comic book writer, or a movie writer, just some kind of writer. Which I think, by the way, is a better preparation for production design than most art schools. Because movies are about story. And of course that’s the biggest problem we have, is getting good stories. Working with lousy scripts, believe me, in film school that’s a big problem. So that’s what I studied in college. I went to Berkeley. I got out of college and I actually applied to film school and I got in but I just couldn’t bear to go. I’d had it with school and I didn’t know what I should do. But I had a strange desire to get into show business and of all things I got mixed up with a theater company that was really a dance company.

And I had this sort of odd fantasy of being a dancer, because I loved dance films. I had no talent but I was young and I was very strong and very thin and so I could actually keep up with people who had talent. A little bit. Enough that I got into a dance company. Which just recently had a revival of one of their ancient pieces from the 60’s at the Redcat downtown. It’s actually a famous piece of avant-garde choreography that they rarely did. When I was with them they decided to do it because a film company was going to document it. And the guy who did our lights was sick. So I wound up doing the lights. I was the natural choice. I wasn’t in the dance really but I was doing the lights. Although I wound up moving with the lights as if it was a dance. But the upshot of the whole thing was that I got involved with the film company. These guys did commercials and one thing let to another and I got into animation.

I did some animation for them because even though I didn’t have any particular talent as a dancer I had learned so much about movement and I had kind of an intuitive way of dealing with drawing and animation so it was all very natural.

Joseph T. Garrity

January 1, 2010 Tom Lisowski 2 comments

Among Joe Garrity’s extensive credits are classic Christopher Guest films including comedies Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, and A Mighty Wind. His ongoing career as a production designer feeds into his work at the film school AFI, where he heads up the Production Design department, inspiring the next generation of visionaries.

JG: Most people who are artists -they kind of figure it out or see it when they’re small. I drew as long as I could remember and then I got this little marionette puppet and I started to be curious about what kind of environment that I could put this little thing in. So there was an interest in creating spaces where they weren’t. And environments where they weren’t. And then stage crew in high school became a very interesting thing to me because I got into these group efforts. I like the idea of being with others to create something and so stage crew became another step for me. And the idea of putting a show on was very interesting to me too. It was a real social thing and at that point I wasn’t a designer of anything but I was part of constructing the sets and painting the scenery and running the lights and being there to run the show and pulling the fly system and all that. So much fun. And so I really enjoyed that and thought that would be what I would do.

And then a movie camera was introduced to me, a Super 8 camera, when I was in high school. I got really into the idea of seeing things, not where you sit in the chair and you look at a proscenium arch from one perspective and lighting focuses the eye, but instead I could choose how to see things with my little camera. So I got fascinated with the language of film and telling the story that way -through this little machine.

AS: So you made your own movies?
JG: I started to make little movies and then I went to college -I went to Temple University into the film department. They made documentary films so I was making documentary films but the theater department was connected so I was always over in the theater department helping with the sets and designing some smaller productions over there. I learned how to draft and I learned about getting serious about designing the sets. Yet I loved the movies, the language of film, so I said I want to combine these somehow and then someone told me about the American Film Institute. I applied to AFI and I wasn’t accepted the first time I went in and then I tried again and got in. It was a one year program at that point and I learned totally by just doing.

There was a production design department and I was one of two that were in that year and so the two of us were busily working on shows and learning. Just learning by doing -it’s a great way to learn- and I got through and did some programs and got noticed by a designer from one of the thesis films that I did and I started working for that person for a couple shows.

Comedy

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