All of these landmark buildings on Fifth Avenue would be there and are actually in The Godfather.
Patrick’s Cathedral, Saks Fifth Avenue and Cartier Building.
“But some of the other things, like Best & Co., which is a department store that is no longer on Fifth Avenue, we had built on the backlot, and we were able to do some previs to work out how to fit the building by taking over the top of it and extending it by three or four display windows. “They were able to rebuild the Don’s office based on the original blueprints of Louis Restaurant where Michael Corleone shoots Virgil Sollozzo and Mark McCluskey was redone completely from scratch,” Mangia reveals. We looked through photo and video archives of New York City, old tax survey photos, and we were collaborating with the art department the entire time to get the aesthetic right.”Īctual set plans from The Godfather were sourced by the art department led by Production Designer Laurence Bennett ( Billions). Mangia explains, “That was part of the reason why it didn’t make sense to shoot the show there, because some of the locations that we were depicting either don’t exist anymore or don’t look anything like they used to. There is nothing clean in New York City.” New York City has changed a great deal since the early 1970s. “It was important especially for me as I’m originally from New York City and of Italian-American heritage, that if we’re making a show about The Godfather set in New York City it has to have that authenticity, otherwise my great-grandfather is going be rolling over in his grave! We did source a lot of the designs of the buildings, textures, grunge and patina that is on everything in New York City. “The visual effects team shot thousands of photographs of neighborhoods, like Columbus Circle, Mulberry Street and Carroll Gardens,” Mangia remarks. Plate photography was conducted in Sicily, but not in New York City. I think my style falls somewhere between realistic and comic book,” Araki adds. “I tried to incorporate the traditional vivid look of Japanese anime while also incorporating realistic layouts. There’s a tendency to immediately draw a dystopia as an unpleasant place, but based on my description, I got them to depict it as a lovely and beautiful place instead.” Despite the fantasy aspect, the characters and story had to have an element of reality. I would also say to the art team that the world outside the bubble was stifling for the characters and that their world should be depicted as a utopia so the visuals would convey their feelings of happiness. From the main characters’ perspective, it’s a utopia. However, for this film, I often told the staff not to portray the world as a dystopian one. “I was also very interested in the beauty of dilapidation. “I think the attraction is in the shock of seeing a familiar cityscape in ruins,” he says. I knew that as long as the film had a lot of action scenes, there would always be places I could use the skills I’d acquired up to that point.”Īraki has his own unique interpretation of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. Wada and his team had a condition from the beginning that the project should make use of Wit Studio’s action animators.
But it was definitely effective.” Executive Producer Jouji Wada had a specific request. I had never used anyone from that section on my previous projects, so it was new for me. We had Mizutamari Higashi do the color scripts for important scenes so we could ensure they turned out beautiful. For this film, we used a process for coloring and lighting called color scripting. It was just a matter of whether or not we thought it looked beautiful. But for 2D animation, since they are drawings, you can place the light wherever you’d like, so it wasn’t that big of an issue. “If this were a fully 3D CG film, we would have needed to calculate the correct lighting, which would have been very difficult. “I believe this film showcases and builds on everything we have done in creating the hybrid 3D CG and 2D animation that we specialized in during the production of Attack on Titan,” Araki remarks.
Bubble is a combination of 2D and 3D animation.