Artisans 19 - randeedawn.com€¦ · Artisans 19 puppeteer. Pizzini’s nominated episodes are...
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19 Artisans puppeteer. Pizzini’s nominated episodes are “The X Factor,” “Pigs in a Blackout,” and “Single All the Way.” “Some people think, ‘You did every- thing in miniature,’ but no, everything was full scale,” she says. “I just wanted people to look at it and feel good about it — not think, ‘Wow, that’s 4 feet off the ground, how did they get that Muppet next to that human?’” She won’t be out of work for long (next up is a job on ABC’s “Speechless”), but she still mourns the loss of such an unusual, challenging workplace. “We were trying to do something a little different, and it needed time to find its way,” she says. “That’s just the creative process.” SILICON VALLEY (3) Richard Toyon picked up his first Emmy for HBO’s “Silicon Valley” last year after 26 years in the industry. He may design for a funny show, but his sets are not meant for laughs. “We try to not tell jokes through set design,” he says. “There are some sight gags, but we try to create an environment that’s believable to the tech industry.” (He’s keen- ly aware of every move being parsed by Redditors.) This year, he was tasked with creating Pied Piper’s new offices for episode “Two in a Box” and a “click farm” in Bangladesh for “Daily Active Users,” in which exteriors were shot in India while interiors were shot in Culver City in a room he could degrade and load up with pre-millennium monitors. All of it has to be on the nose, says the trained architect, who got started design- ing scenery for The Groundlings: “You have to know the tech and understand what the tech is all about.” (And Erlich’s massive Hawaiian blowout in “Bachmanity Insanity” was pure ostentatious sparkle.) Toyon has plans to work on Bill Hader’s “Barry” for HBO, but before that has one oth- er big set to finish designing: a guest house for his mom. TRANSPARENT (4) She may be signed on to help tell the con- temporary story of a retired professor’s transition into womanhood, but seven-time Emmy nominee Cat Smith admits: “I love doing period stuff, trying to fill the space with things you wouldn’t normally think of.” In season two she was able to re-create 1930s Berlin for flashback scenes that had to be credible: “It was incredibly tricky to find sexual materials that might have been in an institute in Germany in the ‘30s.” In addition, the show kept her hop- ping with a wedding episode, “Kina Hora,” (shooting L.A. for Palm Springs) that need- ed to be beautiful but also in the “tacky but also very trendy” style of one of the wives; and a “wimmin’s” festival in “Man on the Land,” complete with many different styles of tents. Yom Kippur-set “The Book of Life” rounds out the nominated installments. Smith clearly adores working with show creator Jill Soloway — they’ve paired for another Amazon series, “I Love Dick.” “The first day of the [‘Transparent’] pilot she came in and said, ‘We should all be hap- py because we’re working on art,’” recalls Smith. “I thought, ‘art?’ But she gives you power and creative input and all of a sud- den, I felt like an artist!” VEEP (5) Creativity aside, there should be a special award for Jim Gloster, who had to move a Baltimore-based set across the country and reassemble it (or try to) for the most recent season of HBO’s “Veep.” “We didn’t build the set in Baltimore to come apart,” he says. “One of the last con- tainers the guys opened over here had a sign in it that said, ‘Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be moved.’” Ouch. That precipitated a redesigned West Wing, Oval Office and new situation room, plus an enlargement of the press room in addition to a rebuild of many other preex- isting sets. But Gloster says he was able to improve things, adding break rooms and long hallways to feature walking-and-talking scenes as seen in nominated episodes “The Eagle” and “C**tgate.” “What I love about the show is it’s about creating a real-looking Washington, D.C., not a Hollywood, D.C.,” he says. “We go for the look of people in political chaos.” The Charlotte, N.C.-based designer is a starving actor turned community the- ater set designer who worked his way up through commercials and stepped up to “Veep.” “This was my first production design job,” he says. “It’s about being in the right place at the right time.” How politic. 2 3 4 5 0817.018-019.Artisans.indd 19 8/15/16 1:50 PM
Transcript of Artisans 19 - randeedawn.com€¦ · Artisans 19 puppeteer. Pizzini’s nominated episodes are...
19Artisans
puppeteer.Pizzini’s nominated episodes are “The X
Factor,” “Pigs in a Blackout,” and “Single All the Way.”
“Some people think, ‘You did every-thing in miniature,’ but no, everything was full scale,” she says. “I just wanted people to look at it and feel good about it — not think, ‘Wow, that’s 4 feet off the ground, how did they get that Muppet next to that human?’”
She won’t be out of work for long (next up is a job on ABC’s “Speechless”), but she still mourns the loss of such an unusual, challenging workplace. “We were trying to do something a little different, and it needed time to find its way,” she says. “That’s just the creative process.”
SILICON VALLEY (3)Richard Toyon picked up his first Emmy for HBO’s “Silicon Valley” last year after 26 years in the industry. He may design for a funny show, but his sets are not meant for laughs.
“We try to not tell jokes through set design,” he says. “There are some sight gags, but we try to create an environment that’s believable to the tech industry.” (He’s keen-ly aware of every move being parsed by Redditors.)
This year, he was tasked with creating Pied Piper’s new offices for episode “Two in a Box” and a “click farm” in Bangladesh for “Daily Active Users,” in which exteriors were shot in India while interiors were shot in Culver City in a room he could degrade and load up with pre-millennium monitors.
All of it has to be on the nose, says the trained architect, who got started design-ing scenery for The Groundlings: “You have to know the tech and understand what the tech is all about.” (And Erlich’s massive Hawaiian blowout in “Bachmanity Insanity” was pure ostentatious sparkle.)
Toyon has plans to work on Bill Hader’s “Barry” for HBO, but before that has one oth-er big set to finish designing: a guest house for his mom.
TRANSPARENT (4)She may be signed on to help tell the con-temporary story of a retired professor’s transition into womanhood, but seven-time Emmy nominee Cat Smith admits: “I love doing period stuff, trying to fill the space with things you wouldn’t normally think of.”
In season two she was able to re-create 1930s Berlin for flashback scenes that had to be credible: “It was incredibly tricky to find sexual materials that might have been in an institute in Germany in the ‘30s.”
In addition, the show kept her hop-ping with a wedding episode, “Kina Hora,” (shooting L.A. for Palm Springs) that need-ed to be beautiful but also in the “tacky but also very trendy” style of one of the wives; and a “wimmin’s” festival in “Man on the Land,” complete with many different styles of tents. Yom Kippur-set “The Book of Life” rounds out the nominated installments.
Smith clearly adores working with show creator Jill Soloway — they’ve paired for another Amazon series, “I Love Dick.” “The first day of the [‘Transparent’] pilot she came in and said, ‘We should all be hap-py because we’re working on art,’” recalls Smith. “I thought, ‘art?’ But she gives you power and creative input and all of a sud-den, I felt like an artist!”
VEEP (5)Creativity aside, there should be a special award for Jim Gloster, who had to move a Baltimore-based set across the country and reassemble it (or try to) for the most recent season of HBO’s “Veep.”
“We didn’t build the set in Baltimore to come apart,” he says. “One of the last con-tainers the guys opened over here had a sign in it that said, ‘Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be moved.’” Ouch.
That precipitated a redesigned West Wing, Oval Office and new situation room, plus an enlargement of the press room in addition to a rebuild of many other preex-isting sets. But Gloster says he was able to improve things, adding break rooms and long hallways to feature walking-and-talking scenes as seen in nominated episodes “The Eagle” and “C**tgate.”
“What I love about the show is it’s about creating a real-looking Washington, D.C., not a Hollywood, D.C.,” he says. “We go for the look of people in political chaos.”
The Charlotte, N.C.-based designer is a starving actor turned community the-ater set designer who worked his way up through commercials and stepped up to “Veep.” “This was my first production design job,” he says. “It’s about being in the right place at the right time.” How politic.
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