This episode also
benefitted greatly from Phil Tatel, a great director of photography.
It's a position that we often don't have the luxury of having, but I
think it's one of the things that makes a huge difference. The
episodes with designated DP s tend to look the best. Even with a
skeleton crew, a DP is worth it. Notice how the colors and moods are
in keeping with each other from scene to scene. There's no blow out
or underexposure. It makes for a much more professional looking
product, and all it really takes is thinking deliberately about your
camera settings. Having the DP do that for you is a good way to do
that. In training our crew, we tried to have a checklist of things
to consistently do every time. White balance, focus, f-stop, etc –
training the routine of the process. One thing that butv
never had that I was always agitating about was getting a light
meter. Using that simple tool really makes a difference, even
shooting on video.
We lucked out with
a relatively smooth process and a great cast. The script showcases
some of Jay's humor and warmth, human warmth being something that my
writing doesn't always bring to the table. I love how Ford and Meyer
develop the chemistry they have. I specifically assigned Jay those
scenes, because I wanted him to make them his own and develop them
in future episodes. I wish we got more of Ford and Meyer, but we
ended up with only one more episode - “Pest Control”. The
Scrambler 3000 was Jay's idea, for example.
Garytt Poirier is
really the scene-stealer though. The pathetic, Willy Loman character
could have been very dull, but Garytt made him likable at the same
time. There's that wonderful scene where he talks to his girlfriend
Rachel. It was shot over by South Campus, and had just begun to
snow. The flakes fall on his shoulders and stay there a moment, like
all the troubles that are falling on him. And then a homeless man,
in the midst of filming, walks up to the payphone and checks the
drawer for change. Priceless! As Orson Welles always said of
directors, they preside over a series of accidents.
A word about
makeup. Up until that point, we hadn't the expertise to employ good
quality makeup. Fortunately, Nicole Herrington had it, so the makeup
for Jakob's deterioration scene was very cool. I enjoyed going to
the bathroom in COM and washing off afterward – it looked like
someone had been murdered. I also wet my hair down with mineral oil
to give it that oily, sickly quality. Makeup is not that difficult,
but it requires some study and some basic principles. I wish COM
taught that kind of stuff, it would have been very useful to us. We
began Jakob's deterioration in “Trust of the Fallen” and I think
the arc works. In each scene he rots a bit more. It was a long
process that we felt was justified by its novelty, but we hoped would
become more casual and frequent as time went on. We needed to
prepare the theoretical audience for the change. But once the
changing had been established, we didn't need that preparation every
time. Casting Garytt who was obviously so good (just look at the
scene at the end where he has clearly changed his personality)
altered the plans to recast Jakob more frequently.
The transformation.
Ah. Well none of us were special effects people. The bass lure and
cherry pie filling was the best I could come up with at the time. A
bit laughable in retrospect. But here's the thing – special
effects are overrated. Immensely. How many times when you are
watching a movie do you say “oh, that giant monster must be real”.
Of course nobody does that, even children. Everyone knows that they
are watching a movie or a TV show and that what they are seeing is in
some sense, despite the genre, a product of trickery and illusion.
We know it and we buy into it. Sometimes we don't know that it's an
illusion, as is the case with good greenscreening or a well-executed
glass shot. But for the most part we can tell that the spaceship is
a model. We suspend or disbelief, just like in theatre, and accept
the reality. The Muppets operate on the same principle, and they are
even more artificial than most special effects are. What I am
trying to say is that the cleavage between good special effects and
bad special effects isn't actually whether it's believable or not,
(the audience suspends their disbelief so frequently that they are
quite versed in the process) but whether the effect conveys the
information or not.
Andrew Cartmel,
Doctor Who script editor and one of my heros, talks of this problem
frequently. The BBC departments often didn't work in concert with
each other, they didn't always get what the tone or the style or the
approach to the material should be. Thus they delivered brilliant
period sets and decors, and horrendous futuristic ones. During the
story Battlefield, they were called on to produce a model of
an underwater lair, a cave where resided the tomb of King Arthur.
The model that they built simply didn't convey what it was supposed
to be. A key detail of the plot of the story is that King Arthur is
an alien from a different planet, and the tomb at the bottom of the
lake was actually his spaceship. Now, the model might have been very
pretty, very “believable” as people like to say, but it wouldn't
have made any difference at all, because the effects team didn't
realize what the story required of the model. The difference
between good effects and bad ones is simple: good effects convey the
necessary story and character information in a way that is in keeping
with the tone of the material. Bad effects fail at this task. Thus,
the bass lure parasite in Jakob's regeneration scene is a bad special
effect. Not because it wasn't “believable” enough, but because
its construction didn't fit the tone of the material. It didn't
serve the story well enough, despite Julie's direction. That was my
fault.
“Salesman” was
a great success. It proved our concept and our methods. I think the
key there was our organization and our teamwork. But we were still
short on content, and I was worried that Shadows would never
be able to compete with Bay State, the giant of butv. We
could never do as many episodes as the soap opera, but we could do
more than we had been. And a core body of work meant a potential
audience. You can't develop that audience without a certain critical
mass of content. The next semester, my last, we pushed out even
further. We divided up our production group into two teams, and set
to work on two brand new episodes, “Pest Control” and “The
Prisoner's Dilemma.” Two episodes that challenged us in very
different ways.
- Justin K.
Rivers
