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MillimeterProactive Designer
Mar 28, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
When veteran production designer Joseph Hodges recently started directing second unit for Fox's 24, he says he felt it represented a long overdue synergy with his design duties. Since Hodges routinely previsualizes sets and shots — and directly creates certain 2D visual effects, backgrounds, and props (largely with Photoshop CS2) — it was natural for him to be more proactive during the production process.
“Production designers should be allowed to art-direct this kind of stuff, and I have been fighting for opportunities to do that work myself,” he says. “I've always used Photoshop [for design], to communicate my ideas. But I also regularly create backings, window shots, photos in the background, lots of things to change sets around. Now that I am second-unit directing, I can have a bigger impact.”
For a shot of a crashed car at the bottom of a Hollywood Hills ravine, Hodges photographed a car on stage, and then he burned the car, ripped off doors, and dented it — all in Photoshop. “Then I printed it out full-size on cardboard and stuck that cutout at the bottom of the hill. When we filmed it, you could never tell there wasn't really a car down there.
“It may cross some lines to have the production designer do those things. But then again, it would be very expensive to [do it another way].”
