(The editor’s note: This article contains spoilers through section 8 of Season 3 of “The gilded age“)
We have come a long way on ”The gilded age“From Marquee Moment of Drama is Agnes (Christine Baranski) who crosses from one side of the street to the other. Season 3 of HBO series Has traveled from Arizona to the entire Atlantic, with of course lots of time spent in our favorite old (and new) home in New York. That presents a new type of challenge for Production designer Bob Shaw And his team, now that they have mastered the mile of marbling and otentatious opera house decorations of seasons 1 and 2.
Russell Mansion and the Shows New York Backlot lives on Long Island – it feels appropriate that Van Rhijn -house, on the other hand, is in Queens. And of course, “The Gilded Age” production design and places still come through their wish list of period -appropriate homes and mansions around the east coast. But Season 3 demanded some Canny Set and site management to fit into everything from a mining town to an English mansion between the show’s existing buildings.
“When you have built that set (Russell House), it would be almost as expensive to take it down and put it together almost as expensive as making it start with,” said Shaw. “The western city was definitely a curve ball (and) we stopped building it on our back. There had been a place where the ferry landing in New Jersey was from Season 1, and that’s what, if we take it down, we can put the western city there.”
“The Gilded Age” is particularly skilled in its ability to sew the place together and set up the work without any signs of a stitch. Characters can go through a door in Newport and enter a room found in New York. But Shaw and his team have also always collaborated with the show’s VFX department to make sets and the work of filling places as invisible, and that work was important for the western mining town of Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) visit, as well as its visit to Showrunner Julian Fellowes Hem Turf.
Shaw and his team were responsible for creating the fictional English country Sidmouth, home for the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) and his new Duchess, Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) – “Nothing will slip off (Fellowes) in that department,” said Shaw. It is a mixture of the show’s typical attitude to cherry -picking parts of incredibly preserved, historically suitable existing places, buildings and VFX.
Much of Sidmouth was shot around and the court, a mansion that was the largest in Newport for three months before the switches opened; It was a finalist for “The Gilded Age” production design team for the ball sequence far back in season 1, but in the end was too busy being used as social distanced classroom at that time.
“It was on my list from the beginning, so finally being able to use it was very rewarding. I think the outside is the most elegant in the look, but we actually had to change the roof line because it has a mansard roof, which is very French and not very English,” said Shaw.
Go into Visual Effects Supervisor Douglas Purver, who went to England and Lidar -scanned another house, so it could be Frankensteined along with what the “Gilded Age” production team shot. Shaw and Purver start talking about how the two departments can support each other very early in the research and development process for each season of the show, a process that they really perfected when creating the Opera House in Season 2.
“Much of it comes with a strategy. Like when we post the western city, we have an idea of how much more it needs to be, so we show him what we provide and then we talk about how much must be done in CG,” said Shaw. “He really won’t know until they have cut together because we can, for example, say that this will extend another thousand meters in this direction and then find when they make the average that they never see in that direction.”
This means that the conversation must continue to achieve the best results, even after the production design team has technically closed the store. For a sequence at the end of section 6, “If you want to fix an omelette”, when Bertha (Carrie Coon) finally leaves the Sidmouth Castle, the shot begins inside the ocher, and looks towards the outside, with a suitable Grand Port-Cochère for her cart to pull in. Shaw met happens with Purver after he had wrapped his own work on Season 3, to have lunch and see how it went, and noticed that the roof in Port-Cochère was flat concrete.
“I said,” Oh, it would be coffee or something like that, “and he said,” Well, what do you mean? “And I drew some references offline, and it made a big difference in the shot it would not have been there if we did not keep in touch after we had a happy thing we planned on the given day.
When it comes to the more action-oriented sequences, of which the carriage turns off Oscar’s (Blake Ritson) Savior John Adams (Claybourne Elder) is just the latest, Shaws and the Purver departments are both. Obviously, only digital horses were used in hit-and-run, but the surrounding devastation and wagons are the production team’s view.
“The Prop department has handled different suppliers of wagons and the wagons and what not. There are a number of people we work with -strangely enough, in New York it is considered part of the proposition and in Los Angeles it is part of the Teamster department,” said Shaw. “There are more collectors out there than you would like and it is easier to find them now because of the internet.”
“The Gilded Age” has packed its back tightly, but that does not mean that you should not see both roads before you cross.
“The Gilded Age” flows on HBO.
