325 sets, 78 shoot days, 7 months of work. It's hard to make a selection and I am not sure where to start, but i'll give it a try!
We Own This City is a limited series produced for HBO, created by David Simon and George Pelicanos. It tells the story of the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force and the corruption surrounding it. The GTTF was put together with the aim of contrasting the rising levels of drug use/dealing and violence in Baltimore but - not only it failed completely - it actually created more corruption and violence and distrust in the BPD.
One of the first elements that stood out after the first reading was the incredible amount of offices, conference rooms and courtrooms. I thought I needed to find a way to help the audience navigate the maze of the various law enforcement agencies and their offices. The solution I found was to assign a specific color palette to each of them. Even thought there wasn't a wide range of colors to choose from for institutional offices I believe that even changing an overall tint from brown to green, or from grey to blue can make a big difference in perception.
As you can see from my initial boards below, the BPD has a bluish grey palette with stark contrasts and areas of negative space, HCN was a off-site makeshift office with a brown and tan palette and plenty of texture, BCN has a greenish palette, tidier and more pleasant offices compared to BPD and BCN.
For the BPD we needed to find locations for quite a few sets (homicide unit, city wide shootings, command suite and more) it was key to find as many as possible in one location and we managed to find them all in one building. As it happened before with the Seagram Building for That Damn Michael Che - I got to design the interiors of 100 N Charles designed by Mies Van Der Rohe.
We got to dress/demolish/build almost two whole floors of the building. One of them contained 8 sets. Some before and after photos below.
