Go to the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking Bryan Singer Shoots Practical, In-Camera Effects on Fox’s House

Shooting The Usual Suspects in 35 days helped feature film director Bryan Singer ( X-Men, X2) understand and appreciate the time crunch and budget constraints of TV production.

"I employed the old Roger Corman school of high-speed, low-budget filmmaking, which is basically what TV becomes when you’re shooting 67 pages in 14 days," says Singer, of his experience shooting the 35mm pilot for Fox’s new hour-long drama House, centering on a brilliant-yet-cantankerous doctor who treats patients with undiagnoseable illnesses. "You save moments. You shoot some things traditionally, and then you pick moments to do a little something special with the camera."

One inspired moment stemmed from a visit to Singer’s ear, nose, and throat doctor. "I had surgery on my vocal chords, so my doctor was checking them out using an orthoscopic lens," he recalls. "I started playing with the lens, sticking it up my nose and in my ears and doing all these other things with it, until I finally decided to order one and put it on our camera. In the pilot, when the camera goes into [actress] Robin Tunney’s nose? That’s her real nose hair! That’s the lens going all the way in there!

"I also love circles," continues Singer, a self-described hypochondriac (a trait that he says drew him to the series). "I love moving through tunnels. I’ve had 14 MRIs, so I’m very familiar with the process of being in an MRI machine. To be able to shoot inside one was not only wonderfully fun because I love the shapes involved, but it was also extremely cathartic."

Due to his successful film background, the network gave the director a certain amount of freedom to experiment with the look of the show. The only notes he got on occasion were for more color. His solution involved a rolling cabinet with rainbow-colored drawers indicating different pieces of medical equipment. "We would roll that cabinet behind a shot or behind a character every once in a while to give it some color. That’s how we tried to answer the note without painting the walls," he says with a laugh.

Director of photography Tom Sigel, who has shot all of Singer’s movies, also worked on the pilot. " Tom and I have an unspoken language and he knew exactly what I was looking for. You should not realize that you’re in a hospital at first. I didn’t want ugliness."

Because the show is set in Princeton University’s teaching hospital, Singer’s main instructions to the crew were to infuse the old with the new.

"Princeton was founded in the 1700s, but it also has modernism to it. Everything’s very elegant." To maintain a yin-yang balance, the crew used a lot of wood, windows, and glass partitions— a combination of modernism and traditionalism to counteract the standard blue walls of a traditional hospital show.

Another signature of the show is the impressive inner-body camera/VFX shots that showcase blood vessels, veins, organs, and, sometimes, the mystery malady itself. Singer had a specific plan to make these shots stand out: "I didn’t want it to look like CSI, and I didn’t want it to be completely digital— I wanted the shots to have as many physical effects as possible."

VFX supervisor James Lima ( Steven Spielberg’s Taken) was brought aboard for the challenge. As a reference, Singer showed him the Massive Attack video " Teardrop," directed by Walter Stern, which shows a fetus sitting inside a womb, with the effects achieved using puppetry and actual fluid.

"Through that example, we take a more fantastic voyage, but built with more practical effects," says Singer.

"The body sets — going inside the vein, flying over the brainscape— those were all physical things, prosthetic appliances," says Lima, who used motion control camera rigs as well as scaled puppets, actual food, and prop food to achieve physical effects. "The brain was about two-and-a-half feet in diameter, as was the stomach. The intestinal tract was about eight feet long."

Lima made sure that the body sets were materials that had a transparency to them in order to reflect the transparency and semi-transparency of the layers of the human body. "We achieved a tremendous amount of sophistication and depth," he says.

As for the particles, white blood cells and platelets, "those were all CG," says Lima. Digital photos, Photoshop, Lightwave, and Maya helped make the extreme close-ups realistic. Compositing was done in Discreet’s Inferno for an HD delivery.

Lima, who started out as an animator, created a rough, animated pre-visualization of the inner-body shots using Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, which were used to show Singer and the network that the effects were initially on the right track. "As we got into more developed pre-vis, we used Lightwave and Maya," says Lima, "but my early version really echoed what we did."

Singer, who is also directing the first episode and executive-producing the series, acknowledges that television is not a platform for his filmmaking style, despite finding moments to make a splash on screen. "Ultimately, I sacrifice some of the more elaborate camerawork and rely on what the characters are saying. That’s what good television is about. Filmmaking is a director’s medium. Television is a writer’s medium. To lose sight of that is na and self-indulgent."

House Credits

Produced by Universal Television for Fox Broadcasting

Executive Producers: (pilot & series): Paul Attanasio, Katie Jacobs, David Shore and Bryan Singer

Producer (pilot & series): Gerrit van der Meer

Director (pilot & episode 1): Bryan Singer

Director of Photography (pilot): Tom Sigel

Director of Photography (series): Walt Lloyd

Production Designer: (pilot & series): Mark Hutman

Art Director (pilot): Kendelle Elliott

Art Director (series): Robert Henderson

Editors (pilot): Elliot Graham, Ray Daniels and Daria Ellerman

Editors (series): Christopher Nelson, Bill Johnson and Sue Blainey

Colorist (pilot): Pankaj Bajpai ( Encore Hollywood)

Sound Mixer (pilot): Rob Young

Sound Mixer (series): Beau Baker

VFX Supervisor (pilot): James Lima

VFX Supervisor (series): Elan Soltes

VFX House (series): Zoic Studios

VFX Producer (series): Steve Kullback