SEASON 3 BEGINS NOW!!!

EPISODE 301:  "ON THIN ICE"

EPISODE 302:  "COLLATERAL DAMAGE"

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS HIDDEN BENEATH THE SURFACE HERE – IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE SPOILERS – RUN!

PART 1 - BEFORE WE BEGAN 

Wow!!  Season 3 is finally here!

You guys have been waiting for nine months!  But I’ve JUST now finished with post production and am already meeting with the writers, lining up directors and crewmembers and having creative meetings with TNT for season 4!!!

Considering that FALLING SKIES only makes 10 episodes a year, it’s an oddly round-the-year job for the head-writer, Dreamworks and myself.  

We completed shooting Season 2 in Vancouver Canada in February of 2012 and I concentrated, almost full time, on editing immediately upon my return to Los Angeles.  Because of the many visual effects and the complex sound design, postproduction – it takes a lot longer than most television shows.  We have the added benefit of not having to be on the air immediately, so this also allows us to take our time getting things right.  Nevertheless, the editing, sound mixing and color correcting process took me into May of 2012.   Which, ironically is just about exactly when the writer’s room started up.

I suppose Season 3, of FALLING SKIES really began for or me and the writers in May of 2012.  Remi Aubachon came back with most of the same writing team from last season, with the notable addition of John Wirth,  an excellent writer and veteran show runner who has been the head writer on many TV series such as THE DISTRICT and SARAH CONNER CHRONICALS.  John and I had worked together an eon ago with Carlton Cuse on the wild and wooly Don Johnson series NASH BRIDGES.  (There are many exciting tales from that era, but that is another story.)   The most notable writers-room loss from Season 2 was Joe Weisberg  who left our show to create another DreamWorks series FX hit, THE AMERICANS.

In early June we had our annual meeting with both Steven Spielberg and Michael Wright, the president of television of TNT.  

These are always exciting meetings to be in.  For one thing, being in a meeting with Mr. Spielberg and watching how his mind works is just a rush.  He truly gets excited about this series and when he gets on a roll, creative ideas flow out of his mind like a gusher.  Michael Wright is also an ideal boss to work for.  He loves FALLING SKIES and he has been it’s strongest advocate from the very, very beginning. 

One of Remi’s key ideas was that the third season was to begin many months after the final moment of Season 2.   The alien who stepped out of the pod at the end of the final episode was going to become an important character.  He told us he wanted to name their race “The Volm.”  Also, the basic construct of the third season, from Remi’s point of view, was that Tom and the 2^nd Mass would now be housed full-time in the ruins of Charleston South Carolina.  Two storylines would proceed from this setting, one was that Tom and co. would be going out from the base of Charleston to do various missions, and the second was that Tom would have become president, and we would explore the political nature of rebuilding a new society.  Jumping forward in time would allow the writers to skip ahead past the potentially tedious mechanics of how all this came to be.  

Among other things, Mr. Spielberg was very interested in how the new race of aliens would interface with humanity and what the differences in their technology would be.  He wanted both their worldview and their technology to be very distinct from the Espheni.  Among other things, Mr. Wright has always been fascinated with the political aspects of New America and how Tom’s character would evolve as a Warrior/Statesmen.   

Within half an hour or so, the story meeting devolved into and exciting round robin conversation about “the end game” – where was this series headed and how would it end!”  It's a lot of fun when you have some of the top creative minds in the world tossing ideas around!

In the course of the meeting, as Remi described the role he saw the new alien(s) playing in the season, Mr. Spielberg suggested that Tom nickname him “Cochise,” as an homage to the famous Apache leader.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochise  

Remi felt it was important that the new alien be bipedal and relatively humanoid.  He really wanted to hire an actor to play the part, versus a fully CGI creation, so that our cast would have someone to really play scenes with. 

Beyond that - a fully CGI character would never be economically feasible to have as a main character.  Every time our motion-capture Espheni overlords appeared last year they were several thousand of dollars - per shot!

Figuring he was the foremost expert in the mechanics of aliens in cinema, I asked Mr. Spielberg his take on how he thought we could achieve this.  I was hopeful that we could create a prosthetic makeup suit, which Todd Masters ad Co. (our skitter creator) could design and that it could be enhanced by CGI later.  Mr. Spielberg was enthusiastic that this could work and offered me several tips in ways to make the process work best.

After that meeting, Remi and I met a couple of times as he was forming the storylines…   There were a handful of new ideas that were going to affect production and which we’d need to get ahead on.  Among the most important was designing Cochise and hiring an actor to play him.  The character who stepped out of the pod at the end of the season was fully computer generated.   While we needed the design to be as similar as possible to the CGI Volm, some modifications would have to be made in the design to fit human anatomy. 

Remi wrote some special scenes to audition Cochise and we began to make lists of LA-based actors and to audition Vancouver actors to play the part.  It was Todd Masters who suggested Doug Jones.  I was unfamiliar with Doug’s work at the time, but he is undoubtedly the premiere make-up suit actor in the world, probably in the world:   For God sake, he was ALL the creatures in PAN’S LAYBRINTH, he was Abe Sapien in HELLBOY, and he was The Silver Surfer in FANTASTIC FOUR 2….  And my irreplaceable assistant was most impressed by the fact that he was The Gentlemen in the “Hush” episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. 

Doug also has a significant non-makeup-effects resume as well.  Todd pointed out that, while it might sound like a great idea to hire an actor, unless someone knows how to wear 60 pounds of latex rubber covering their whole body and face for 14 hours a day – they will scream like little children and want to quit.

Todd also told us that the design and fabrication of the Volm suit would require 10 weeks.  Unfortunately, by the time the machinations of hiring Doug occurred… only 5 weeks were left.  Masters and Co. worked 24-7, but we didn’t quite have the face and body ready for episode 301.  So in some shots from tonight’s first episode Cochise is fully CGI and in some his body is practical, but his face is CGI.

The other MASSIVE project that took place was for Production Designer Rob Gray and the art department.  The key location in Season3 is going to be the above ground ruins and the below ground infrastructure of the city of Charleston.  By the time TNT picked up season 3, we had only 6 weeks to shooting…  Realize that this show has never had any sound stages to work from, the way every other TV show in the world does.

In season 1 we housed much of our story in a real abandoned school.  In season 2 we were all on the road and shot on location all the time.  We saw Charleston from afar and used an abandoned mall as our underground studios – but we’ve NEVER had a proper set. 

Now we were going to first take the Ajatan studios buildings which we’d used in season 2 and build a whole post-bomb city!   We were also finally going to recreate, on a proper sound stage, Tom’s office, a war room, a medical clinic two other bedrooms and two labs and a bunch of connecting corridor.

We also were going to build  a big new set walled “The Nest” which was to be Pope’s bar and hang out.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done a small addition to your house, like add a bedroom or maybe you've remodeled a kitchen – but it takes more than 6 weeks!  Rob had 6 weeks from the time he arrived, suitcase in hand, to the time we started shooting to build EVERYTHING!!!  And to further hamper him - the money he had to do it can best be described as – highly inadequate.   Watching all of our new sets go up, knowing they were being produced with next-to-no money, was a marvel!  Rob is a superhuman!!!

But you’re probably wondering about the actual show too, right?

As you can probably tell, the first two hours were really written and filmed as two distinct episodes, and they were grouped together by TNT for the premiere.  Remi wrote the first hour, which I directed.  Brad Thompson and David Weddle wrote the second hour, and my old SMALLVILLE compatriot, James Marshall directed.

PART TWO – THE EPISODES

Remi discussed with me his vision for the opening act of Season 3.  He was definitely living in the “Go big or go home” philosophy.  His initial vision was to film the whole sequence on the ice glacier that exists about 50 miles north of Vancouver at Whistler Mountain.  I think the episode title “On Thin Ice” comes from that idea.

Now I’ve shot on the glacier before and it’s spectacular.  For the Season 4 finale of SMALLVILLE, when Clark Kent was transported to the fortress of solitude, we were able to pull it off.  But that was because it was a very small crew and there was no actor there besides Tom Welling, and it was the last day of filming for the season.  Tom and I flew in the first helicopter, at dawn.  Then two more helicopters transported our equipment in very slowly – and once everything was there we began filming with snowplows and snowmobiles to help move us around.  It was very slow work and I don’t think we did more than 6 or 7 shots all day.  Tom Welling and I have talked since, that that day on the glacier was one of the most spectacular days of our filmmaking lives.  But, as you can tell from my description, and if you’ve seen the opening sequence – there was NO way we were going to be able to achieve a scene as complex as the Season 3 opening under those kind of conditions.

I tried to get Remi to let go of his icy vision, and he did so…  If slowly.  I scouted for alternatives and found, after much searching, a rock quarry that was both spectacular and quite remote-looking.  I presented Remi the idea that it could be a mine, and that the skitters were using the harnesses kids to mine ore for some unknown purpose.  He accepted this, and encouraged me to invent the sequence based on the location.

What was important to Remi was that we introduced the characters in layers, first we see just Matt and Weaver and Jeanne.  They have one mission.  Then Ben and a new set of de-harnessed kids arrive, then Maggie and Hal and Pope and then when it becomes clear that a trap has been sprung on our heroes Tom, and our new ally Cochise arrive.

Beyond that, Remi let me use the environment I had to develop the specific details of the action.  He was in Los Angeles and I was in Vancouver and we communicated almost daily as I fed him ideas of the “we can’t do that, but we can do this…” variety.

It was Remi’s idea to have our heroes on horseback – and Noah fully supported this.  Noah has done some westerns over the years.  He’s a very good horseman, as is Will Patton.  Sarah Carter also used to ride horses competitively as a girl.  And even Connor Jessup rode horses as a kid on a series filmed in Australia called THE SADDLE CLUB…  SO  with his many experienced riders, and post-apocalyptic fuel running low, the question of horses becomes an inevitability – and here they finally are.

http://s71.photobucket.com/user/bearkiller1/media/ManyArmedGoddess.jpg.html

The other idea was that more Mechs came out from under the ground to trap our heroes and to show the audience that the whole operation had been leaked to the Espheni.  In the original script there were 4 or 5 regular Mechs who came from under ground.  This would require us building deep holes which the effects department could put pneumatic "shakers"  which would then be covered with both real and plastic boulders.    But I didn’t have the physical space for them.  And, truthfully, Remi and Noah and I all agreed that the Mechs have kind of lost their threat.  I felt like this was an opportunity to do something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile and that is to bring in a new bigger and more badass mech.

Why not just have two “Mega-Mechs?!”  So designs were drawn.  The idea would be that they would be huge and powerful with numerous arms – like Shiva 

The opening sequence was a monster to plan and shoot.  It had to be fully storyboarded and planned to a “t” – an then It took three full days to film, which is equivalent to, like, a year on a feature film.  And I was running around crazily the whole time – with two full camera units pointing in different directions filming different things.  For all three days we filmed from sunrise to sunset – there are about 800 separate edits in the sequence and 120 visual effects shots -  all that is a monumental amount for less than 10 minutes of TV.

And even so, there were ideas that never made it to the screen, either because we cut them our for budget or time reasons before we shot, or because I couldn’t get to them on the day.

Specifically:

Ben was supposed to drop in with four or five other de-harnessed  kids.  But the desender rig was complex and expensive so one-by-one we cut it down to just two kids.

I wanted there to be a second Mech guarding a high road above the quarry.  I had a cool scene where Maggie drove in, in the Humvee, while Hal on the 50mm gun blasted the big robot down.  The Mech was going to roll down the hill and take out an old guard tower.  We were going to use steel barrels rolling down the hill to accomplish this – but for time reasons we just couldn’t get to it.

There was also a scene which Remi really wanted where Pope leaped onto the back of a Mech, and while it bucked him around like a bronco he ripped off it’s (already disabled from battle) arm and then fired his weapon into it’s chest cavity until it was incapacitated.  We built a green-screen bucking bronco rig for Pope to ride, and we were going to drive it around on a little  gator-golf-cart contraption with both Collin Cunnigham and a stunt man riding at various times.  But a day or two away from filming, it became clear we were NEVER going to have time to get to it in our schedule – and so it was dropped.

There was one sequence that we filmed and then omitted in post production.  Originally, after the battle with the mega mechs was over,  A beamer came flying in from above to bomb the 2^nd Mass.  Cochise leapt from his horse, grabbed a big Volm Cannon-gun and blew it out of the sky.  This was intended to demonstrate clearly the superior Volm technology…   But when the sequence was edited together, and after much deliberation – we all concluded that the scene was anti-climactic and we omitted it.

Beyond that - let me give you a few tidbits from the second hour...

Robert Sean Leonard is an old friend of Noah Wyle's and he was Noah's suggestion.  They did a movie together long ago called SWING KIDS

Gloria Reuben was suggested by Noah, TNT and Dreamworks almost simultaneously.  She had just completed filming on LINCOLN when she got to us.  She is a lady and a professional and I adored working with her,.

The flamethrower used to fight back the crusty kids was not scripted.  The stunt man and the effects team proposed it to the director on the night of filming. 

The scene where Maggie blasts crusty kids in the hallway was not scripted, Sarah Carter and director James Marshall came up with all that badass action together and shot it all in less than an hour.

During the shootout in the woods there were so many automatic weapons fired so many times that the budget for the entire season of ammunition was used up in one night

The location of the nuclear power plant was an old paper recycling mill in Vancouver.  The nuclear towers and dome were added with digital visual effects.

On the day of filming of the opening scene of the episode, Conner Jessup had just taken a red-eye flight from flown Toronto, where he had received an award at a film festival, to Vancouver and had had no sleep.  He still got all of his dialogue perfect.

Some of the harnessed “crusty kids” were played by real children and some by little people who were stunt performers.  It took each of them over two hours to get into their makeup and a team of twelve special effects makeup artists to get them ready on the day of filming.

In the scene where Matt yells “You’re not my mother” to Anne, the director secretly told Maxim Night to yell an unexpected curse word to Moon Bloodgood, which resulted in her genuinely shocked reaction which you see in the episode.

Whew that's enough for now - enjoy the pictures and storyboards and I'll be back with episode 3 behind-the-scenes next week.

WEEKS BEFORE SHOOTING I TAKE THE CREW OUT AND SCOUT LOCATIONS

*  ROB GREY - HE BUILT THIS CITY   *

*   THE ACTORS GATHER FOR THE FIRST DAY OF PRODUCTION    *

*    BEFORE DOUG JONE'S COCHISE SUIT WAS READY WE SHOT THIS FELLOW IN A "GREY SUIT" TO TRACK A FULL-CGI COCHISE ON TOP OF   *

*   DREW ROY TESTS OUT HIS NEW SEASON 3 "WHEELS"    *

*   POP AND HIS GANG AT REST    *

*    NOAH WYLE KNOW HOW TO WORK A WHEELCHAIR AS WELL FROM HIS MANY YEARS ON "ER"   *

*     MPHO KHOA READY TO WORK  *

*    GOATS - A FAILED EXPERIMENT - WE LET 'EM RUN LOOSE ON SET AND THEY CAUSED HAVOC   *

*    MOON GETTING "PRETTY-IZED" ON SET   *

*    DR. BLOODGOOD IS THE ONLY HUMAN TRAINED TO WORK THE ALIEN DE-HARNESSEING DEVICE   *

*   THE YOUNG LADIES OF "FALLING SKIES"    *

*    I APPLY BLOOD TO THE CAST    *

*   Connor Jessup and Megan Danso    *

*   CONER RESTING UP BETWEEN BEATINGS    *

*    NOAH RIDES IN TO SAVE THE DAY (WHITE HAT IS THE ONLY DETAIL MISSING)   *

*   WILL PATTON LEADS THE TROOPS    *

*   A MOTLEY GROUP    *

*   THEN, FOR A DAY OR TWO DOUG'S SUIT WAS READY, EXCEPT FOR THE FACE WHICH WAS ADDED AS CGI (HE KIND OF REMINDS ME OF A "SPONGE BOB" CHARACTER LIKE THIS     *

*    I SUPERVISE THE DIRTY, DIRTY HARNESSED KIDS   *

*    THAT SKITTER HAD TO GO   *

*     DREW MAN'S THE BIG GUN  *

*   WHILE SARAH CARTER   KEEPS THE MEGA MECHS AT BAY *

*   PRESIDENT TERRY O'QUINN - MOMENTS BEFORE HIS ASSASINATION    *

*    ON SET WITH THE PREZ   *

*   NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK ROBERT AND GLORIA RUBEN    *

*   DIRECTOR JAMES MARSHALL INSTRUCTS THE CAST FOR A SCENE IN EPISODE 2   *

*   JAMES MARSHALL AND REMI ON SET    *

*   DREW OY CONSULTS WITH HIS DIRECTOR    *

*    JAMES MARSHALL WATCHES A TAKE WITH DP NATE GOODMAN   *

*     THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS  *

*   MAGAN DANSO FIRED AN AUTOMATIC WEAPON FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS NIGHT...  AND THEN FIRED IT AGAIN... AND THEN FIRED IT SOME MORE....  ALL NIGHT LONG    *

*    THE WARRIORS AWAIT THE BATTLE   *

*     CONNOR AND MEGAN  *

*    ROBERT SEAN LEANORD IN HIS LAIR AS PROFESSOR KADAR To create the character of Dr. Kadar, actorHE donned a pair of smudged glasses, a wig which Falling Skies hair stylists coated in grease and a half cup of stage dirt.  He had a lot of fun!  *

*  NOAH TAKES A PICTURE OF HIS OLD FRIEND ON OF HIS FIRST DAY WORKING     *

*   "   --        JARED KEESO PLAYED "LARS" - INTERESTINGL, EVEN THOUGH LARS DIES IN EP. 2 THIS PHOTO STAYED UP IN THE HAIR AND MAKEUP TRAILER ALL SEASON...   HMM.... PROBABLY JUST BECAUSE IT WAS SUCH AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF WOUND APPLICATION   *

*    BLOOD IS APPLIED ON SET   *

*     AND THE CAMERA IS SET UP FOR MAGGIE TO RUN TO LAR'S AID  *

*   LUNCHTINE ON SET ---EVEN A CRUSTY KID HAS TO EAT    *

*     ROB GREY - HE BUILT THIS CITY PT. 2  *

BELOW IS A PARTIAL SET OF STOYBOARDS FOR THE OPENING SEUQUENCE OF EPISODE 1...  NOTICE THAT THERE WERE SOME THINGS PLANNED AND EVEN SHOT THAT AREN'T IN THE SHOW LIKE (1) POPE LEAPING ONTO A MEGA-MECH, RIDING IT AND BLASTING IT TO BITS AND (B) COCHISE SHOOTING A BEAMER OUT OF THE SKY...