Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome David Bomba. In this interview he talks about the first three decades of his career, the importance of research and realism in creating the worlds for his stories, the changes he’s seeing in the world of episodic storytelling, and the collaborative nature of this field.. Around these topics and more, David dives deep into taking over the third season of the hit Netflix show “Ozark”.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
David: My name is David Bomba and I am a production designer on the third season of “Ozark”. I’ve been in this business since I graduated from college. I studied architecture at Texas A&M graduating with a bachelor’s degree in environmental design, and when I graduated, within months I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in production design in film.
My mentor was George Jenkins who was an Academy award-winning production designer. He did many films for Alan Pakula – “Sophie’s choice”, “Klute”, “Presumed Innocent”. He won the Academy award for “All the President’s Men”. He was one of my last phone calls on a long list of names that I wanted to contact upon arriving in California. I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles. I didn’t know anybody in the industry, and I just knew that I wanted to pursue design. George allowed me to audit his production design class at UCLA. He and his wife Phyllis became good friends of mine, and his teaching and support was what kept me in Los Angeles in those early years where I was trying to get any door to open up.
What George emphasized was research and realism in design. Whether his films were period or contemporary, he did extensive research. Back then we were using Polaroids and film when gathering information and researching the old-fashioned way. When you scout, you go into a house and you look at something. For instance, my job on “Ozark” this season was to build the casino and to develop the Missouri Belle. I was familiar with offshore gambling facilities, as I grew up in New Orleans. I knew riverboat or barge style gambling where all of the gaming is on the water – that’s the restriction for gambling in certain states that the actual gaming has to be on the water. They use boats or barges, and the casinos are built on the water.
That’s what we were presenting on “Ozark” on Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri – a floating casino. So I went and researched several different gambling facilities. One of them was in Indiana on the Ohio River, and then I drove with Wes Hagan, the location manager, down to Caruthersville, Missouri and saw another one. We ended up in Memphis where I dropped Wes off, and then went further down into Mississippi to Tunica to see a couple of casinos there. The casino was the key design challenge for me and was one of the reasons that I actually took the job.
Production design of “Ozark” Season 3 by David Bomba, Byrde Foundation gala. Courtesy of Netflix.
Kirill: If you look at the changes that the art department has seen in the last 30 years from the technical perspective, what do you think has been the biggest change?
David: One of the things that is different is the amount of prep time. It seems with many projects that the amount of time that you have to gather information and to develop ideas is becoming shorter. I just remember having more time in the early part of my career.
Speaking of technical differences, back when I started, we were shooting on film. Different types of film stock reacted differently to color, surface, pattern and texture. You tended to have more of a dialogue with cinematographers in developing these aspects of design. For instance, they might choose a particular film stock for night because it holds on to the solid blues or the blacks.
For me there’s been a big difference between film and digital. Digital quality keeps changing and getting better and there are ways to tune things in a different manner. The lighting challenge on the interior of the casino on “Ozark” was different from any other job that I’ve ever experienced.
“Ozark” is the first episodic production that I’ve done where in ten episodes, there were multiple directors and cinematographers. You’re dealing with different personalities, how they work and what they like and dislike. As an artist, you are drawn to certain things and you gravitate towards certain things. What impressed me especially was working with Jason Bateman who is acting, directing and producing the show. He was going to direct the first block or first two episodes. As an executive producer, he had a lot of say on what the entire season was going to be.
Jason and I had an early conversation about tone and color and palette. Then Ben Kutchins and Armando Salas, the cinematographers, came in with their ideas of color and palette. Armando, in particular, was somewhat reticent to go into the reds and golds that I wanted to introduce into the Missouri Belle. It was not the blue-gray look that the show was known for. It wasn’t shadowy or watery. It was a different palette, but Jason specifically wanted to step outside of the lines of that palette and the look that had been established. That was another reason why I came into this third season. The show had established a certain look in the first two seasons, but in conversations with Jason and the showrunner, Chris Mundy, I was assured that I was going to have an opportunity to expand the look of the show- and that proved to be true.
We expanded the palette in this season, and we really opened up some the texture and the scope of the show. It was with the Missouri Belle casino and compound, as well as revealing a whole other world with Omar Navarro’s hacienda in Mexico. We introduced him and his environs, and that was another exciting challenge that I was given.
Another thing that is different on an episodic production is that you don’t have the opportunity for an extensive dialog with your director. I’m used to doing features where the collaboration lets you develop and expand a vocabulary, and it’s different in episodic. I got to do that somewhat with Ben during prep. Armando came in towards the end of the initial prep period to engage with the casino and the set that we were building for that. But overall, the prep dynamic was quite different for me.
Production design of “Ozark” Season 3 by David Bomba, REO Speedwagon concert. Courtesy of Netflix.
Continue reading »
If you’re seeing this popup when you launch Eclipse itself, or the Eclipse installer on your macOS, this post is for you. First, there’s a bit more details on the Eclipse and JDK bug trackers. To fix this, you will need to uninstall the problematic JDK version and install the latest one on your macOS machine:
- Run the
/usr/libexec/java_home -V command to list all installed JVM versions.
- Identify the problematic version of the JVM – in my case it was “
14, x86_64: "Java SE 14" /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.jdk/Contents/Home“.
- Delete that version – with something like “
sudo rm -rf /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.jdk/“
- Install the latest matching JVM / JDK – at the time of this writing it is 14.0.1
- Verify that it appears in the list of installed JVMs with
/usr/libexec/java_home -V
- If needed, point the
Eclipse.app/Contents/Eclipse/eclipse.ini to the location of the newly installed JVM (-vm parameter)
Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome John Paino. In this interview, she talks about changes in the way stories are made in movies and television over the last few decades, the ever-raising quality and expectations bar from the viewers, what captures the audience’s attention, and what stays with him after a production is over. In between all these and more, John dives deep into his work on “Sharp Objects”, “Big Little Lies” and “The Morning Show”.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself, and how early you knew that you wanted to be in this field.
John: Going to a movie theater is magical, and I would go whenever I could. I actually was more inclined to be a fine artist, and I went to school for cartooning in New York in the early ’70s. I found that cartoonists are the worst teachers in the world. They sit at their desks and they’re so into their inner life. They’re not good communicators. So I gravitated to the fine arts department at the School of Visual Arts.
Once a week I’d go to St. Marks movie theater and watch “Blade Runner”, so I was always intrigued by that world. After I graduated from the art school with a degree in fine art, I got kind of tired of the whole New York art scene. One day I happened to wander into a theater and just volunteered, starting building and painting sets. It was in the off-off-off-Broadway theater world. Then, slowly, some people who were in theater started doing music videos in the ’80s. Then I started designing sets and doing production design for music videos and commercials. And then some of those people started doing films.
That lead me to working on low budget indie movies in the early ’80s in New York, and that’s how I segway’d into film design. That’s been my path into this field.
Production design of “The Morning Show” by John Paino.
Kirill: If I had a time machine, and I could bring the young you from the ’70s / ’80s all the way into 2020, would you say that the overall structure of the art department of these productions would still be recognizable?
John: I think they still would in the art department. We still have to physically make things. We still have to design them.
Sure, the computer technology has shortened some work times. But there’s also the human factor. Directors, for the most part, still want to walk in a set. They want to see it. They want to look at the reference you’re putting together. My big thing when I design is making mood boards that convey atmosphere. With those images, you still want to go get those out of magazines. If I can, I still go to the New York public library’s picture collection and pull swatches from there.
I still have bags of fabric. The art department still has bags of fabric and pictures from old newspapers. Computers certainly have shortened some work as far as getting from point A to B in certain respects. But people still have a tactile need. I have to carry this stuff around from place to place, and I wish everything was digitized. I wish I could have someone digitizing all my art books 24/7 [laughs].
There’s still a physical aspect to designing movies, seeing things built, and the director walking into an office and seeing all kinds of stuff laying around – tile, samples of wood, etc. I don’t think that aspect of it will ever change.
Production design of “Sharp Objects” by John Paino.
Kirill: Is there something that is feasible to do today technically or maybe economically that wasn’t as achievable – or not achievable at all – 20 years ago?
John: I used to do a lot of high-end commercials. Let’s say you go back 20 years ago, and you wanted to have daisy petals come out of a flower and then fall on the ground over and over again. I had incredible prop makers who were able to build a physical flower that had a cable running through it where pedals would come out of it and then drop to the ground and then be resettable. That was expensive and a lot of times commercials would not do those things, because they were just too expensive.
The other day I saw a commercial where someone is in a nondescript office and their computer starts spitting out shredded paper by the thousands, and it fills up a room. Only the biggest clients would be able to do that physically, and I worked for high-end clients that would go for it. We would do it physically, and that was really interesting and challenging. You’d have to have really skilled people to be able to do it and then reset it. You’d have to think about it more.
Now it would be achieved with CGI. I’m not saying you don’t think about it as much, but there’s something lost when you’re not as involved with it and it gets subbed to someone else who will be creating it. From the economical standpoint, you can do all that a lot cheaper, and people are doing it more and more, not just in commercials.
The flip side of that is that people who are trying to do a million dollar movie have at their disposal these incredible visual effects to achieve things that were simply not available to me back in the ’80s when I was working on indies. That’s a positive thing to have people being able to do that. These are the two sides of technology in film.
Sketches for “Big Little Lies”, courtesy of John Paino.
Continue reading »
Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my delight to welcome Zachary Galler. In this interview he talks about his path through the various positions in the camera department in his career so far, the hidden complexity of what goes on behind the scenes to bring these stories to our screens, digital vs film, and working with multiple directors across the season arc of a show. Around these topics and more, Zachary dives deep into creating the worlds of the delightfully sumptuous “Briarpatch”.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Zachary: My name is Zack Galler, and I started in this industry about 18 years ago. I grew up going on set, because my dad was a director of documentaries and small commercials when I was a kid.
I had the love for films since I was 14 when my dad took me to see “Pulp Fiction” in a theatre. It’s cracked my head open like an egg, and I realized that there was stuff that you could do and say at the movie that I hadn’t even conceived of as a kid. I fell in love with it, and I started gorging myself on all sorts of different things. It started with Tarantino who was, for me, the coolest director. When I got a little bit older, I started getting into European cinema, but basically I had this love for film when I was in high school. I used to go on set with my dad and he also knew some casting directors. So as a summer job growing up, I would go be an extra on a TV show and spend my time there.
Then I went to film school in New York for about 18 months, and ended up feeling like there are so many prerequisites. It felt like it was things I had already discovered on my own, and I ended up dropping out to play music – not knowing exactly how I was going to be getting involved in film in New York City. At some point I was talking to a gaffer on a job that I PA’ing on, and he got me a job working in a lighting rental warehouse. That was my introduction to the technical side of things. I worked there loading grip trucks to go out on jobs in the New York area for about a year. Then I started going out on sets and worked my way up from there.
I was an electrician and a grip, and then I was a gaffer. I had a really good DP taking me under his wings early on, probably before I was ready. That gave me the confidence to explore and he taught me so much. The first film I shot that had any cohesiveness to it was for this Columbia grad student, and I started building my portfolio from there doing music videos and shorts in New York – teaching myself camera language using the knowledge I had from lighting.
I shot a bunch of indie movies, and I was really lucky that the first feature I did got into Sundance competition, and the second feature I did got into Berlin. After about 6-8 indie movies, my agent reached out about a TV show and it’s been a lot of TV ever since and a couple movies in between. So that’s been my journey through the lighting department, starting as a truck driver and a warehouse guy, and working hard ever since.
Cinematography of “Briarpatch” by Zachary Galler.
Kirill: When you talk about what you do for a living, how do you convey this complexity of how many people are involved in bringing these stories to the screen?
Zachary: The way that I look at my job is that I’m creating a world for the viewer to escape into or exist within, and cinematography has to be comprehensive like that.
Think about what it takes to make your everyday life going, and now imagine installing that temporarily in the warehouse somewhere or making that on a random street in New York. It takes a lot of people because there is a ton of detail, and the better shows are a complete world. You need to have a safe work environment that lets people to work within these space. It has to be well thought-out from an aesthetic angle. There are many layers of detail in the production design, the location and the lighting, and it takes a lot of people to put these things together in a way that lets you take them down again after you’re done shooting.
There’s an interesting interview with Harris Savides I read a long time ago where he compares this to merchant marines. You have this army of a sorts that comes in, does their thing and then takes it all down and disappears. Usually, it’s a hugely efficient, well-run machine.
Kirill: If I go along with this metaphor, do you want me as a viewer to think about this complexity, to think about all the layers that go into telling these stories when I’m watching it? I certainly don’t think about everything that was involved in making that loaf of bread when I buy one at my local grocery store.
Zachary: Ideally, the viewer is never thinking about anything technical like that, but rather ingesting it through the osmosis of what we’re serving. I’m there to serve the story and the actors, and usually they are holding up their end of the bargain. I don’t want the viewer to think about the camera or notice a cool looking light. I’d love for them to be able to immerse themselves in the world.
Hopefully, we’re creating worlds that look seamless and not contrived. My ideal goal is to always create a realistic world for you to exist in. But if a viewer is feeling self-aware, that becomes less effective, and the spell that we’re trying to cast is a little bit less strong.
Cinematography of “Briarpatch” by Zachary Galler.
Kirill: Your portfolio has sections for different types of productions, from music videos to commercials to narrative storytelling. Is there any particular kind of production that is your favorite, or do they all exercise different parts of your creative brain?
Zachary: They all exercise different parts and they all have their own merits. I feel lucky that I’ve had the chance to work on a diverse variety of projects. Feature films definitely scratch a different itch than commercials, and TV is an in-between – and each requires a different skill set.
TV is such an interesting combination of crafts. You have to be so aware of your time and schedule. When I’m working on a TV production, it feels like you’re fighting schedule, while on movies you’re fighting the budget – and it’s all made better or worse by how much you can get everybody to care about the story you’re telling. Commercials are a whole another, sometimes frustrating, ball-game altogether. On music videos you usually fighting against your resources, but they provide such a fun platform to experiment visually.
Once you come up with the way that the world exists on your TV production, you have to go so fast – but not necessarily formulaic. By the time you’re on set, there are certain choices that you’ve already made, and there’s not a lot of time or room for discovery. Sometimes you get lucky and you get to work with people that support that, but that doesn’t happen frequently.
Cinematography of “Briarpatch” by Zachary Galler.
Continue reading »
