The Office

The first of our (it was then supposed to be three) weekends was in the works for months. Even before Alec and I started breaking the script, we knew we would be building the Grey Raven’s office. With the amount of screen time (three scenes) that take place in the location, and the logistics nightmare that filming in an actual office would provide (twenty stories up during the day and at night, with a superhero coming in through the window?) made the decision pretty simple.

As we started discussing the shoot with the production coordinator at Chapman (Michele Kennedy), the only sound stage that was available was the smaller of the two main stages (Stage A). Don’t get me wrong, even having a stage is pretty sweet; however, Stage A provided to be a touch crammed when trying to fit a 30 foot green screen at a far enough distance away in order to light it. When all was said and done, we were punching a 10K through the side window and 16 park hands on speed rail worked as sky bounce.

Because of all the visual effects, our DP (Andrew Davis) picked the 7218 film stock from Kodak—at 200iso, the plan was for our grain to be nice and tight, making effects tracking/compositing much easier. However, as you can see from the pictures, the stock has a lot of latitude, and as a result, our window did not blow out (of course, it’s times like these you realize why the term “fix it in post” was coined heh)

The set was designed by Dorothy Street (Production Designer) and Mike Grier (Art Director/Visual Effects). The cabinets (and most of the office) were built from scratch by Mike Grier, Josh Grier, and Mitch Fait. The below render was an early test from Mike, to give everyone an idea of the kind of set he wanted to build.