Big Bang Theory Season 5 Behind The Scenes

I'll ask you a favor to just give a great hand to our amazing crew here thank you very much to the group my relationship with the department heads is interesting because as a director I have to deal with all of them there's just a lot of interaction that goes on every week well we start Wednesday morning a lot of production meeting at 10 o'clock at that point the sets are standing and they aren't mostly painted the production meeting can be kind of crazy because there's a lot of questions flying around we talked about how best to integrate all our efforts two o'clock on Thursday we have a run through the producers where they'll change things on Friday we get to see the lighting that we did on Thursday whether it's working or not and by then I have to be done done done with the set we reassure everybody that it will be done it's gonna be okay you got it you got it gotta work Monday morning we'll come in and we'll be shooting we could do all the camera blocking and we get to make all the final adjustments Tuesday coming rehearse everything again new producers run through a three o'clock and she was shown at 6:30 the audience such finely tuned instrument this show that it all comes together and as I say we make a sandbox and then we stand back and let the cast play in it you wonder my opinion oh boy do I the reason you're fixated on a good-natured simpleton like penny is that she's the exact opposite of your first romantic attachment you're brilliant yet intimidating mother where on earth did you get that from it's in her book needy baby greedy baby we are standing in front of Sheldon and Leonard's apartment their living room their main living space here in Pasadena somewhere there isn't a single light in here that doesn't have a purpose somebody once said to me do you need so many lights and I said oh please tell me which one to turn off I'll be happy to do it you'll see soft light you'll see hard lights the hard lights are projected lights this china ball is just ambience on this other side we have a lot of feel light I use fill light to set the mood we have lights that are under counters these are great highlights in our backgrounds over here we have the stairwell it was the producers bill and Chuck's concept to have K Lee's character live across the hall and we really had the opportunity then to make a nice little space between the two apartments and Bill and Chuck were very interested in having a space that they could tell the story while people were walking you ever wonder how humans would be different if they evolved from lizards instead of mammals okay let's talk about that but I had this extra wall in the middle between the two stairs I'm going what can we do that would be interesting so I said I'll put an elevator in there and I took the model in to show it to the producers and they said but we wanted to walk up and down the stairs I said I know cuz the elevators broken right the object of Settlers of Catan is to build roads and settlements to do so it requires wood now I have sheep I need wood but every week something revolves around the prop whether it's like their video games they're playing the games they play they came up with I have to manufacture myself or have someone do it I really just tried to get inside the head of characters and I choose everything based on what I think they would choose believe it or not I get so many emails and letters of people asking you what the food this is a vintage Fewster to me it was just a cool to put on the wall and we have this DNA sculpture over here which I was so excited to find of course there were no giant DNA models anywhere and so I basically had to buy two and we had to have our metal shop make an armature to hold this up and then you know my fantastically talented that dressers sort of put it all together and made the two one we've got this terrific backing that you see behind us it's a Caltech in Pasadena and it's it's lit slit for night and I'll show you uh okay you guys take it over today please and then the exact same shot was shot for day that's a photograph on it's called digital backing and we add extra light to it to get that nice sunburst in the sky and go ahead and raise your night you get a little bit of more depth for day and then we'll cast lighting that comes across the set and will have lower source lighting coming through the room that'll give you different times of day oh dear during the live show we mainly watch for continuity from take to take we've done some pre shooting so we have to match what we've done we're always watching for the stray or the hair that was in front during back it's always a constant it's really important I mean if you know bottles here in one take we don't put it back in that same place and they start editing back and forth between tanks you'll see the actor one time and bottles here the next flute to go back to another actor they'll come back to him again the bottles over here can't we have to work really quickly we don't want to keep the audience waiting you can see the relationship of the audience to the set it's quite close and it's all about making sure that the audience can see at all times and what that means to us is this is an area in which we don't like we make sure that the audience can always see the actors because their response to what the actors are doing is the most important thing that we're doing here remarkable in just under a half hour 200 metric tons of fuel ignite and a controlled explosion right beneath Howard's keister well this final episode of the season was a real challenge this episode was so challenging in so many ways we were sort of outside of our comfort zone and doing things that we don't normally do at all was a lot of different things the authentic space capsule a real astronaut and a wedding this has been a riot to shoot because it's kind of a single-camera episode for us there were quite a few curveballs one in particular was there was a specific kind of lens that we needed every week I just look at Steve Millar or bill will say what do you got for me this week and sometimes will give me a little smirk I got word about three weeks before that we were gonna have to come up with a replica of the Soyuz space capsule and I went oh no I just thought how on earth am I ever going to figure this out or pull this off because I've I've been around the decorating block and I knew that there were no Russian rocket parts out here to decorate with so I'm like okay what can we do with some wood and some fabric etc so first of all you start with the research we got a lot of help from NASA and they took a lot of pictures of the Soyuz and sent him to us I went online and looked at whatever I could come up with but I found the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Camp in Hutchison Kansas and I called just out of the blue and spoke to this really nice guy and they happen to have a capsule there from from Russia and so he was very generous and he went and measured it so I could get the exact dimensions because I had to start with something so that everything else could build down into it and we did drawings and construction and upholstery set decorator and her staff went out looking for a lot of the buttons and things that we put inside of it and thank goodness I was so lucky that we live in Los Angeles and we have an aeronautical scrap yard here it's this enormous warehouse that's filled from top to bottom with rocket parts this is a Russian spacecraft that we have here that they've replicated so it's not that easy to get everything correct you know a lot of shows 111 117 episodes in would it get a little lazy about such things and this crude is not a fruit Lopes want to hit your fan switch check of course when I went to the aerospace scrapyard they did not have Russian rocket parts there and so I just got the closest things possible to what I saw in our reference photos I really took my hat to our wardrobe department to set designers because it looks absolutely real in fact Mike an astronaut came in and as he got into it he goes okay this is a little bit like a flashback they really wanted to make sure that everything was correct that all the detail was right hey Mike quick question I missed it in the briefing how much you're into this suit oh very very small set for us we had three big gentlemen all smashed together in this little rocket and the shooting of it had an incredible amount of challenges you know three people in the capsule you think one camera a couple lights I mean you've got a hundred people standing around trying to make that thing work we've been doing trips to the mill to make sure how we can shoot it we've been doing camera tests building extra pieces and just watching it layer and layer and layer the window of opportunity for us to get lighting and camera in here was as limited as any other set that I've ever shot in my life the wide-angle lens is so wide it almost sees behind itself so any lighting that we put in there was going to either be seen by the camera lens or by the hoods that they were wearing one of the hardest things to put on a set it's like a round glass like say flower bowl or something because it's reflective of every single light in the studio and the way we got around that was we use something called black silk and it doesn't pick up any reflection in the hood we were able to shoot very very hot light right through this black silk and it's able to fill up the whole inside of this capsule with this ambient light so after lighting this about tent times we found a way to basically light inside this tin can wash we're ready to start we're ready when I see a rich well it's a rooftop wedding yes um so we're exposed to the elements although they don't figure into the scene I don't even need to bring that up no but it's the rooftop set that you guys have used for bouncing all sorts of fun things and doing fun things on the roof you know we've been to the rooftop before and at that time it was full of scientific equipment so now we had to go up and decorate it for a wedding okay now we're ready everyone is using their own ways to their own expertise do you really make this wedding happen the only thing that was significant about planning for the wedding on the rooftop for me is that I think I wanted to make it cuter than really was character appropriate we know it's short notice but we love you all to come with us no no no this is not the wedding I wanted sometimes you cheat a little and make it a little nicer than it really would be and I was hoping to cheat a little bit this time but the director and some of the producers thought that Koothrappali would not have had quite enough time to really make it cute and really make it nice even though he had good taste I keep telling you if I wasn't an astrophysicist I would have been a party planner it was always a coin flip we talked about it said what did he do with a few hundred dollars in about two hours so they had to bring me in a little bit to make it sort of a little more casual and a little less decorated I just wanted it to be cuter cuz it's Bernadette's wedding and she's so cute when I look at the two of you starting your lives together it fills my Oh what Gavin I need a minute because it was thrown together it was to be kept quite simple problem yeah Kaylee's hair we thought would look really pretty up because she had a great dress on am I better glasses it give her a chance to wear her hair a little fancier than she normally does mimes character loved that tiara and that tiara had to be incorporated and then Melissa had the beautiful veil well I'm very excited with this dress I think they did a beautiful job I may steal it at the end of the day my job was actually relatively easy this week with that it was just their rings the five by six cards for the actors to read their little speeches from and the bouquet for Bernadette it's um it's complicated because it's again not not a very typical multi camera for camera scene we've got a jib going on we're gonna have to do some reverses we have a lot of people involved and so we've we've pushed walls out I've added walls in the back I've added camera ports on the side we're gonna be shooting from above down below and all around and that's been that's been the biggest challenge not so much speed bumps as just little hurdles that we've had to deal with it was one of those Network moments where you're running around and everything came together 15 minutes before it needed to it was so gratifying to see that it did come together and it did look so great and everyone was so happy by the state of California and the Klingon High Council we now pronounce you husband and wife getting to work with the most extraordinary cast and crew is just unbelievable it's so wonderful to be involved in a long run show that continually surprises us and engages us every week every every different properly episode you learn something new it's been such a gratifying wonderful season and definitely one of my favorites but we definitely work very hard eunbi here we go and action the cast may go home after a couple hours but oftentimes our crews here for 12 hours doing stuff I have to say the most fun part of this episode as well as my entire job is when the producers come in and they step to the monitors and they see all the hard work come to a head I get this look over Bill Brady and Chuck Laurie's face like oh this is gonna be good that to me is really fun and rewarding really rewarding to watch everybody doing their job and it's really a great experience that's been the most enjoyable part of it is just sort of seeing everyone really after five years still enjoy themselves and not look at this as drudgery and go another day let me just get through this and and then we can worry about next year there's no feeling of that I can't wait to find out where we're gonna start out in the next episode

Channel: paaaaammmmmiiiieeeee

Views: 2,828,262

Rating: 4.8909292 out of 5

Keywords: dvd extra features

Id: TmvWgcXVLcQ

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Flamewire]

I don't remember the specific number, but there's an episode where the guys are trying to bounce a laser off the moon, and one of Penny's boyfriends comes to watch with questions like "How do we know it won't explode?" and such.