Rosco Spectrum: The Gilded Age on HBO Max is a period drama that pits two nineteenth-century families against each other. The van Rhijn family represents “old money,” while the Russells, who just moved into a palatial estate across the street, represent “new money” gained from the Industrial Revolution. Below, Art Director Laura Ballinger Gardner shares two Gilded Age set design techniques that the production design team used to create their period 1880s backgrounds using Rosco SoftDrops®.
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I have plans of declaring my concentration as Scenic Design. When thinking of how I want to use Carnegie Mellon as a resource to further my education, I often ponder where I need/want the most support in defining my personal experience as a designer. I feel I have the research, organization, and ideas, but where I feel the most lost and a lack of confidence in is in my actual execution. I can draft everything, create renderings, but I personally feel I struggle to make the idea physical. Right now, I am in the process of doing this for imaginarium. So, I have been researching as many tools and ways of approaching the building process as possible in order to have the best executed final product possible. So, this article seemed perfect! Additionally, my set exists in a very similar way to this production. I am creating a dollhouse-sized room, so reading about how they created and used their model was very helpful for me.
I can only imagine how hard it must be to replicate 1880s New York from just models and visual editing. While there is a lot of architecture that remains from this time period, in most cases it is obstructed by modern additions to the buildings. It always fascinated me when walking around NYC, whenever I would come across a film set, as to how they would transform the sets and streets into whatever time period they needed. Specifically, I loved how they would bring in dozens of historic cars just to add extra emphasis to setting up the time period. Obviously, In the 1880s more carriages would be needed and whatnot, but the ideals remained the same. New York in the 1880s is so different from what it is now and trying to replicate that is no easy task. The only film I can remember that tried to replicate New York from that time was Gangs of New York but that pertained more to the 1860s, but nonetheless, it was incredible to see a glimpse of what the city looked like then. Not much of High Society was portrayed then but this is a very interesting take on a similar period.
Prior to reading this article, I had never heard of a drop being used in this capacity. When I first started reading, I was skeptical of how the SoftDrop would look on camera and with actors playing around it. However, considering the scale needed for this size of production I can see why Laura Ballinger Gardner chose to use SoftDrops as opposed to having these background set pieces built. I thought it was very interesting to see the developmental process of art director Laura, from concepts to the reference photos and then finally to the real thing. I honestly think my favorite part of this article was reading about the Day/Night drops, not only because they had to be uniquely crafted, but also because the original photos were altered to match the time period, which in my opinion shows great attention to small details. It makes me wonder how often this style of background scenery is used in television production.
The use of SoftDrop is a technique I didn’t know existed before. I’m not sure if I’ve misunderstood this, but it seems similar to the backdrops they use in a photoshoot! I think the idea of using a drop instead of building mini set models (like they did for French Dispatch by Wes Anderson) is very practical because I imagine that it would save a lot of time and labour, which also means that the cost is reduced. I also really appreciate the combination of taking photos of real-life architectures and using image rendering softwares to alter into something that fits the setting of the story. Prior to reading this article, I always felt that backdrops or this kind of image rendering would be very easy to see right through – the audiences will be able to tell that it is not real. But now I think that technology and materials are so advanced that any ‘weak spots’ can be fixed easily.
The biggest theme that came across in this piece was that it was an ad, it was definitely a way for this company to show what their teams and products were capable of doing and it was a bit interesting to see some of the finer differences between canvas materials. But this article reminded me of a longer conversation I’ve been having with myself about what type of scenic design is interesting to me, what I want to do as I move forward I find myself understanding now that traditional movie scenery isn’t as engaging to me personally as it is to other people, I still love the effort and the detail work and am always astounded by it when I see people do this but I find it restrictive and I realize that I more interested first in interactivity with the scenery and a blurring between what is real and not and a blurring of what is comfortable and expected and what is uncomfortable and not supposed to be in a situation.
Wow this was fascinating! I love the gilded age. I always presumed they used cgi out the window. This is a tremendous amount of work. It leads me to question a number of things. Firstly, I wonder if they can use these drops in theater. I presume they can but they are likely incredibly expensive, however I wonder if they use them on broadway, or what the benefit is to doing this vs hand painting, or if there is a noticeable difference to an audience or for lighting. I also wonder how long these take to print as well as how they are printed as I suspect ink isn’t the dye or material used. I am also impressed how much digital editing they can do on such a large image. I also noticed how large of a drop they had to create for such a small window and I wonder why that is.
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